Development of Agility Enhancement Strategies for Agile Manufacturing

Abstract

The business dynamics has changed drastically over the few decades due to persistent changes in customer requirements, frequent technological innovations, volatile market conditions, increased competition at local and global level, availability of alternate sourcing options, changes in sourcing contract from long term to short term, newlineshrinking product life cycles etc. The earlier manufacturing strategy mass newlineproduction system relied on producing products in huge quantities and thereby newlinemaintains lower unit production cost. The success of this system was attributed to the newlinehigh demand for a small set of products which the customers were forced to consume without having any alternate choice. The profit was function of volume and manufacturing scenario was very stable. With the changes in manufacturing scenario i.e. wide choice of products for consumer to choose from and innovations in technology and processes the mass production system was found to be unviable. The volume based profit making ventures failed to sustain and manufacturing newlineindustry with this strategy started to collapse. The search for a better manufacturing philosophy which could work in a dynamic, flexible and unpredictable environment was urgently needed to revive manufacturing industry. Agile Manufacturing (AM) is proposed in response to the current business environment as a solution and is newlineperceived as the need to address these issues. The manufacturing organizations are newlinestriving for its successful adoption in order to maintain competitive advantage in their newlinebusiness. AM has attracted contributions from researchers around the globe. It can be newlineviewed as an evolution or logical progression from existing manufacturing systems.The current research on AM is focused on developing the systematic methodologies newlineto study and analyze the various aspects related to enhance the agility of AM in newlinegeneral and Indian industries in specific. The methodologies are proposed and newlinedeveloped to understand, analyze and select right set of Agile Manufacturing Enablers (AME