Integrating Lean, Agile, Resilient and Green Supply Chain Management in Engineer-to-Order Contexts: Insights from Expert Interviews

“LARG” is a supply chain management paradigm that combines different managerial approaches to achieve waste reduction (Lean), rapid response to customer requests (Agile), resilience to disruptions (Resilient), and environmental sustainability (Green). LARG practices could help addressing some of the strategic priorities of Engineer-to-Order (ETO) contexts, such as the need for responding quickly to customer requests, while assuring resiliency in a volatile context like the current one. However, its feasibility in ETO contexts is still understudied. The purpose of this paper is to open a debate on this topic. To do that, we develop a conceptual framework of the main LARG practices, based on a literature review, and then we validate it through four expert interviews, with managers of Italian machinery companies. Our results suggest three main managerial recommendations. First, they show the benefits of servitization for both resilience and sustainability, thanks to services, like remote monitoring, that allow to reduce material and energy wastes, while limiting the need for travelling. Second, they stress the role of modularity as an antecedent both of “leagile” and of servitization in ETO contexts. Third, they call for a higher adoption of green practices, which are much less widespread than lean, agile, and resilient ones, despite some early signals of change. Thus, this paper addresses the call for further research on supply chain paradigms implementation in ETO contexts, and opens new avenues for future research.