Agile Manufacturing: A Border Perspective

Abstract

Manufacturing along the United States-Mexico border was built on the low-cost and low-technology model of early maquiladora plants, which offered cheap alternatives to the U.S. labor rates and an alternative to labor-intensive assembly and attractive tax benefits. Forty years later, other areas of the world are offering a lower cost alternative to the same targeted manufacturing organization. The alternative choices are often a lower-cost option, making the United States-Mexico border region an option that gets left out of the equation. A review of the literature and an investigation of attractive features of the border region suggest a different approach that highlights the advantages of a proximity-based model interspersed with the components of agile manufacturing.