An Assessment of Supply Chain Flexibility in the Bottling Water Industry in Ghana

Companies nowadays face complex, continuously changing and uncertain environment through accelerating technological changes, global competition, innovation, rise in customer demands and expectations, expansion of market and other factors has necessitated firms to adopt supply chain flexibility in their operations to cope with the uncertainties in the business environment to meet the fluctuations in demand. Flexibility in supply chain management creates an opportunity for the firms to improve its operational scope in order to achieve competitive advantage. Adoption of the flexibility strategies helps companies to increase their market share and growth and stay in competitive business. Some of the flexibility measures include product development cycle time, product variety and customer requirements disparity. The study seeks to determine the supply chain flexibility drivers and the extent to which these drivers have influence on the supply chain performance in the bottling water industry in Ghana. Questionnaires were employed as a tool to collect the primary data from the field and the secondary data were collected from Internet and articles. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were adopted. The study was limited to the bottling water industry in the Kumasi Metropolis due to its geographical location and availability of market. The findings indicated that existing products must be modified to attract customers. The study recommends among others that there should be product modification, avoiding shortage of raw materials and customer complaints should be handled tactically in order to attract customers and increase sales.