The role of agile strategic capabilities in achieving resilience in manufacturing-based small companies

This article describes a practical ‘top-down’ strategic framework to assist manufacturing-based SMEs to develop a degree of resilience when operating in turbulent business environments. The approach builds on the premise that resilience occurs as a result of the implementation of both operational and strategic capabilities. The framework is based on earlier work in the area of manufacturing agility implementation in SMEs developed by the authors, and involves the integration of operational agility tools with tools and approaches from the strategic development literature. With the inclusion of a multi-strategy assessment tool, SMEs are able to prioritise their capabilities to achieve a level of ‘strategic readiness’. This article demonstrates how the approach is applied using two case studies carried out within two traditional manufacturing-based SMEs.