Agile manufacturing

Traditionally, manufacturing industry has been very much producer lead. Even the supporting techniques ± work study, stock control, and so on ± were designed to reduce costs and help the manufacturer. The range of products available in the marketplace was such that such an approach worked ± the customer had to wait to get what he/she was offered. The ``quality revolution of the last ten years arose because the marketplace has become increasingly global. The big players cut across national and even international boundaries in ways which has opened up customer choice. The growth of service industries where the customer often plays a direct role in the service delivery process has lead to an increasingly sophisticated and aware customer base. Manufacturing can no longer assume that it can put products out to customers to its own schedule and quality levels. Of course, most manufacturing industries have realised this ± at least those parts of the industry that have survived. They have spent the last ten years searching for change ± change that will allow them to identify, and respond to, customer desires, and that will allow them to get their products to market quickly. This responsiveness has become known as ``agile manufacturing ± the organisation has the agility to respond quickly to particular, and changing, customer needs. One of the contributing factors to the ability to become 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. Goldman et al. (1995) 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. Most of these (in fact the first three) are also the attributes of ``lean manufacturing.