Agile manufacturing: A framework for research and development
Introduction
Businesses are restructuring and re-engineering themselves in response to the challenges and demands of 21st century. The 21st century businesses will have to overcome the challenges of demanding customers seeking high quality, low cost products, responsive to their specific and rapidly changing needs [1]. Agility addresses new ways of running companies to meet these challenges. Agility is about casting off those old ways of doing things that are no longer appropriate – changing pattern of traditional operation. In a changing competitive environment, there is a need to develop organizations and facilities significantly more flexible and responsive than current existing ones 2, 3.
Agile manufacturing can be defined as the capability of surviving and prospering in a competitive environment of continuous and unpredictable change by reacting quickly and effectively to changing markets, driven by customer-designed products and services [4]. Agile manufacturing is not about small-scale continuous improvements, but an entirely different way of doing business [5]. Agile manufacturing is a new expression that is used to represent the ability of a producer of goods and services to thrive in the face of continuous change. These changes can occur in markets, in technologies, in business relationships and in all facets of the business enterprise [6]. Agile manufacturing requires to meet the changing market requirements by suitable alliances based on core-competencies, organizing to manage change and uncertainty, and leveraging people and information.
Agile manufacturing is a vision of manufacturing that is a natural development from the original concept of `lean manufacturing'. In lean manufacturing, the emphasis is on cost-cutting. The requirement for organizations and facilities to become more flexible and responsive to customers led to the concept of the `agile' manufacturing as a differentiation from the `lean' organization. This requirement for manufacturing to be able to respond to unique demands moves the balance back to the situation prior to the introduction of lean production, where manufacturing had to respond to whatever pressures were imposed on it, with the risks to cost and quality. The move to lean production from agile and vice versa is a major challenging task 7, 8.
Most of the literature tends to focus on a few enablers/strategies of AM without a comprehensive framework for achieving AM. In most cases, those agile strategies and techniques are disconnected. Such a comprehensive framework can be developed either by field studies or by a systematic literature survey to identify the key strategies and techniques of AM and then integrate them to develop an AMS. Since AM is at the developmental phase, it is worthwhile to develop the idea based on existing studies. Therefore, literature survey is the adopted methodology in this paper for the development of a framework for an agile manufacturing system (AMS).
The organization of the paper is as follows: Section 2presents the classification of the literature available and a brief review of the previous research on AM. Comments on the literature and future research directions are discussed in Section 3. A framework for the design of AM is presented in Section 4. Section 5concludes the paper.
Section snippets
Classification and a review of previous research on agile manufacturing
In this section, a classification of the literature available on AM and a brief review of each article are presented. Agile manufacturing includes rapid product realization, highly flexible manufacturing, and distributed enterprise integration. Technology alone does not make an agile enterprise. Every company must find the right combination of culture, business practices, and technology that are necessary to make itself agile. In this paper, the focus is on the operating conditions of factories
Comments on agile manufacturing literature and future research directions
Theoretically derived hypotheses and empirical studies to test them are conspicuously absent from studies of the agile organization. A study by Hoyt et al. [62]a scene in this direction. Although it seems intuitive that the ability to respond to dynamic and unpredictable changes in the environment should contribute to a company's success, this fact has not been scientifically tested.
The survey of literature has provided further insights into the AM concepts and systems including strategies,
A framework for the design of agile manufacturing systems
In this section, a framework for the design of AMSs is developed. This development is based on the literature survey and its analysis. It can be seen that most of the literature on AM and related issues either deal with strategies or techniques, but not an integrated view of developing an AMS. In this section, an attempt has been made to present an integrated strategic and techniques framework for the design and development of AMSs together with people and systems issues. Agile manufacturing
Summary and conclusions
With the rapid changes taking place in the global market, it becomes clear that enterprises working on an AM base or in mass customization will rapidly become leaders. In order to design efficient production systems and factories operating in these manufacturing paradigms, new design approaches need to be developed. This paper synthesizes some of the research work done on the AM to develop a framework for the development of AMSs. The model presented in this paper can be tested with the help of
Acknowledgements
The author is most grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on the earlier version of the manuscript which helped to improve the presentation of the paper considerably.
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