Discuss the importance of designing flexibility into the transportation network

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: Flexibility needs to be designed into the transportation network. When designing transportation networks, managers should take into account uncertainty in demand, as well as availability of transportation. Ignoring uncertainty encourages a greater use of inexpensive and inflexible transportation modes that perform well when everything goes as planned. Such networks, however, perform very poorly when plans change. When managers account for uncertainty, they are more likely to include flexible, though more expensive, modes of transportation within their network. Although these modes may be more expensive for a particular shipment, including them in the transportation options allows a firm to reduce the overall cost of providing a high level of responsiveness.