"Agility is dynamic, context specific, focused on aggressive changes and growth oriented. It is not about improving efficiency, cutting costs, or avoidance of competitiveness. It's about succeeding and about winning profits, market share and customers in the very centre of competitive storms that many companies now fear"

Agile manufacturing is a vision of manufacturing that is a development from the concept of Lean production. In Lean production, the emphasis is on the elimination of sources of waste. Lean implies high productivity and quality, but it does not necessarily imply being responsive to unique customers’ demands. Agile stresses the importance of being highly responsive to meet the `total needs’ of the exact customers.

The agile manufacturing system should be able to produce a variety of components in a short time period. To achieve Agile Manufacturing status, companies primarily need implement agile design processes. Agile product development system is capable of addressing frequent iterations of multiple design options early in the process, based on continuous testing and highly sophisticated customer driven design changes. Agile manufacturing suggests certain future directions for the further evolution of the lean enterprise system to help enterprises develop capabilities to thrive in fast-changing and uncertain environmental conditions.

The agile manufacturing enterprise can be defined along four dimensions:

1. value-based pricing strategies that enrich customers;
2. co-operation that enhances competitiveness;
3. organizational mastery of change and uncertainty; and
4. Investments that leverage the impact of people and information.

Agility has four underlying principles:

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

Need for Agile manufacturing in the manufacturing industry

1. Enrich the customer
2. Have a flexible that allows rapid reconfiguration of resources
3. Cooperate internally and with other companies in order to enhance competitiveness
4. Nurture an entrepreneurial culture that leverages the impact of people and information
5. Agile teams are multifunctional in order to combine the knowledge and skills necessary to enrich the customer
6. Agile teams are co-operative both within and between companies, to enable the intra- and extra-firm cooperation needed to enhance competitiveness
7. Agile teams are virtual, which allow the company to combine resources (people and information) as needed in order to pursue entrepreneurial goals