Supply chain flexibility: A review of the academic literature: Paper presented at 7th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Complexity Management; Book of Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Industrial Management - XVII Congreso de Ingenieria de Organizacion, Valladolid, July 10-12th, 2013

Although Supply Chain Risk Flexibility (SCF) has become more popular over the last decade, attempts to synthesize research within this field have seldom been conducted. Aiming to fulfill part of this gap, this paper presents a systematic reeview of the literature on SCF using a content analysis approach. Two important electronic data bases were used in this process (Science Direct - Elsevier and Emerald Insight). In pseudo code, the following phrase was adapted to the search engines in each database: "Supply chain Flexibility" using as reference the title, abstracts and keywords of the papers. Thirty papers published between 1998 and 2013 in 19 peer reviewed international journals have been retrieved. Interest in the subject is growing, as evidenced by the number of papers recently published on different aspects of SCF reaching a pick in 2012. The paper provides a discussion of main definitions available, although there is no universal definition of the concept. The collected papers are classified in the theoretical, empirical and theoretical empirical dimension, allowing a reasonable comprehensive assessment of research approaches taken in the current body of literature on the subject. The results highlight the high number of definitions for SCF, the main topics in SCF research and research applications, identify the key issues addressed in these researches, and emphasise remaining gaps that deserve special attention in future research