Many authors recommend the use of manufacturing flexibility to minimize the harmful effects that risks instill in manufacturing companies. However, the multidimensional feature of manufacturing flexibility and the several different types of trade-offs make it difficult to select and customize the flexibility level to be adopted due to the existing variables. Moreover, choosing wrong types of flexibility for the solution of problems may lead to unnecessary and inadequate investments resulting in capital loss and inefficiency in the use of flexible resources for risk anticipation. Therefore, it becomes crucial to provide operations management with results that allow the selection of different types of flexibility according to the company's needs and resources availability. Hence, an empirical research contemplating eight companies from five industrial segments was carried out by means of an analogy with risks diversification in stock portfolios. Five different types of flexibility portfolios are proposed for five different industrial segments
Risks; Flexibility type selection; Manufacturing flexibility; Empirical research; Industry; Stock portfolio
