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Write a note on agile manufacturing and its integration into product-process development. Give suitable examples to elaborate your answer.
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"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.

Example

Lean production was created at the Toyota Company in Japan. This production concept is focused on the elimination of waste and creation of steady and cost saving production process. The seven main types of waste were defined as

  • “Unnecessary movement of employees – it is any movement of people or machines that is viewed as a value added service toward the product or service;
  • Waiting – this means idle time created while waiting for items that are not immediately available;
  • Defects – it represents the product which does not meet customer requirements.
  • Unnecessary transportation movements – it is moving work over short or long distances without adding value;
  • overproduction – this means making more products earlier or faster than it is required;
  • Unnecessary process steps – it means work processes or materials that add no value to the product from the customer’s viewpoint.”

However the agility means an enterprise wide response to an increasingly competitive and changing business environment, based on four cardinal principles: customer satisfaction; rapid adaptation or changeover of equipment; usage of human resources and cooperation for the competition. It was defined in the research that

“The agile manufacturing assimilates the full range of flexible production technologies, along with the lessons learned from the total quality management, “just-in-time “and lean production.”

The main features of the agile manufacturing can be summarized as follows:

  • “Products: They are solutions to customer’ individual problems. Agility is centered on the satisfaction of customer’s individual needs and the quickly changeover of equipment.
  • Virtual organization: Internal and external co-operation are the strategies of choice. The aim is to bring agile products to market in minimum time by leveraging resources through co-operation.
  • Entrepreneurial organization: Companies must “organize to thrive on change”. Agile manufacturers must have personnel who can convert change to the growth.
  • Knowledge-based organization: The key differentiators in tomorrow’s world will be people and information. Thus, agility contains the decentralization of authority and leverages the value of human and information resources.”

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