Agile manufacturing is a term applied to an organisation that has created the processes, tools, and training to enable it to respond quickly to customer needs and market changes while still controlling costs and quality.

An enabling factor in becoming an agile manufacturer has been the development of manufacturing support technology that allows the marketeers, the designers and the production personnel to share a common database of parts and products, to share data on production capacities and problems — particularly where small initial problems may have larger downstream effects. It is a general proposition of manufacturing that the cost of correcting quality issues increases as the problem moves downstream, so that it is cheaper to correct quality problems at the earliest possible point in the process.

Background

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Traditionally, the manufacturing industry has been producer-led. Even the supporting techniques — work study, stock control, and so on — were designed to reduce costs and help the manufacturer. The limited range of products available in the marketplace allowed such an approach — the customer had to wait to get what he/she was offered.

The quality revolution of the last two decades of the 20th century arose partly because the marketplace became increasingly global. The largest manufacturers cut across national and even international boundaries in ways that increased customer choice. The growth of service industries and the proliferation of self-service customer interfaces, led to an increasingly sophisticated and capable customer base. Manufacturers could no longer assume that they could innovate and produce products exclusively at their own pace and quality levels.

Increasingly, manufacturing industries recognized the need to quickly react or even anticipate changing market demands or lose share or even be forced out of the market altogether. The result was the adoption in recent decades of new forms of production including agile manufacturing.

Key attributes

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Goldman et al. suggest that Agility has four underlying components:

1. delivering value to the customer;
2. being ready for change;
3. valuing human knowledge and skills;
4. forming virtual partnerships.

The first three of these are also attributes of lean manufacturing.

References

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• L. Goldman, R.L. Nagel and K Preiss, Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations - Strategies for Enriching the Customer, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995.

See also

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Quality

Manufacturing