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Effect of ICT integration on SC flexibility, agility and company’ performance: the Mexican maquiladora experience

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Abstract

This article reports a structural equation model (SEM) with four latent variables to measure the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICT) integration with supply chain flexibility, supply chain agility, and company’s performance. The SEM integrates six hypotheses with relationships among variables and is validated with 378 responses from manufacturing sector to a questionnaire and partial least squares technique is used to evaluate it and test the hypotheses statistically. A sensitivity analysis is conducted in different scenarios to know conditional probabilities of occurrence of dependent variables, since a scenario has occurred in the independent variable with low and high success level. Findings indicate that ICT integration in supply chain facilitate to monitoring the production process, partners integration and have a direct effect on agility and flexibility for manufacturers, providing an active material’ or subassemblies’ flow among partners with greater visibility and making agile and joint decision-making.

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Acknowledgement

The authors thanks the managers, engineers and people who work in the industry and who answered our questionnaire. Without their support, this paper would not have been possible.

Funding

This work was supported by the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT) for its support under project CONACYT-INS (REDES) 2018 - 293683 LAS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, Ave. del Charro 450 Norte. Col. Partido Romero, 32310, Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico

    Jorge Luis García-Alcaraz & Valeria Martínez-Loya

  2. Department of Electric Engineering and Computer Sciences, Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, Ave. del Charro 450 Norte. Col. Partido Romero, 32310, Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico

    José Roberto Díaz-Reza

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of La Rioja, Luis de Ulloa 20, 26004, Logroño, La Rioja, Spain

    Julio Blanco-Fernández

  4. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of La Rioja, Luis de Ulloa 20, 26004, Logroño, La Rioja, Spain

    Emilio Jiménez-Macías

  5. Department of Business and Economic Sciences, University of La Rioja, Luis de Ulloa 20, 26004, Logroño, La Rioja, Spain

    Alfonso Jesús Gil López

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  1. Jorge Luis García-Alcaraz
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  2. Valeria Martínez-Loya
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  3. José Roberto Díaz-Reza
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  5. Emilio Jiménez-Macías
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  6. Alfonso Jesús Gil López
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Correspondence to Jorge Luis García-Alcaraz.

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García-Alcaraz, J.L., Martínez-Loya, V., Díaz-Reza, J.R. et al. Effect of ICT integration on SC flexibility, agility and company’ performance: the Mexican maquiladora experience. Wireless Netw 26, 4805–4818 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-019-02068-6

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