In today intense turbulent era and crumbling economy flexible practices are key to superior organizational performance. The purpose of this paper is to identify key variables of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) through systematic literature review. Further attempt has been made to resolve debates related to relationship among various constructs of FMS and their relationship using interpretive structural modelling (ISM) and TISM analysis. The result shows that management commitment and management strategy leads to availability of skilled and trained workers and high commitment and motivation. The present study has tried to answer three questions out of six key questions of Whetten (Acad Manag Rev 14(4):490–495, 1989) from his seminal article “What constitutes a theoretical contribution?” i.e. what, how and why. The study has employed ISM, fuzzy MICMAC and TISM to develop a FMS framework and formulated strategy to implement in Indian scenario.