Agile Manufacturing - An Overview

Abstract

Agility as a subject is still a developing area. Companies are starting to move towards agile behavior, often not in a planned way, more usually they "fall into it" and as a result it tends to be operational and lacks strategic direction. As a first step, companies need to understand the basic ideas and become intelligent respondents to the concepts. Agility is a long term issue for businesses and achieving agility is a journey, not an objective to be attained before moving on to something else. The implementation of agility is still very much a frontier activity, involving radically new concepts concerning strategies, organisation, people and technologies. It takes businesses into a domain where fundamental and taken for granted assumptions are challenged. Agility is a paradigm shift and before one can move forwards one has to understand the existing paradigm and to face up to the often painful task of accepting that current practices and beliefs are no longer appropriate or relevant.