Agile Manufacturing

This article describes key attributes required for you to become "Agile". (The phrases "Efficient Consumer Response" in the food industry and "Quick Response" in the clothing industry have been used to describe similar features).

If you are seeking the keys to agility and the solutions to the above problems, read the article and then help us in our research on this subject and request a free copy of our "Agile Manufacturing Self Diagnosis". (Because it probably means that your Agility is inadequate!)

Links to other best practices and training at bottom of page.

Agile manufacturing is a concept designed to make your business more flexible, with many themes. It attempts to satisfy customer needs, however unreasonable these may at first seem in relation to your ability to achieve them, based on the three principles:

  1. "Customers do not want choice. They want what they want" (& generally now) ("Agile Product Development for Mass Customisation"; David M Anderson & Joseph B Pine II).
  2. "EOQ should be what the customer wants" (See Previous Malpractice of the Week 005: "Economic Batch Quantity EBQ / EOQ: The worst way to set batch sizes")
  3. "Enriching the customer" (solving their unique problem by (if necessary) modifying your product or service)

("Agile Competitors and Virtual Organisations: Strategies for enriching customers", Goldman Nagel & Preiss)

"Agility" includes "leanness" because a high stock or spare capacity method of providing flexibility to changing customer demands or adversity is not a viable financial option. In the UK at the moment we are witnessing an unprecedented growth in warehousing to store the off-shore manufactured goods, (which have been manufactured "Just In Time"). Agile Manufacturing demands the near elimination of finished goods by increased flexibility in terms of the ability:

This overcomes an opposite problem of lean manufacturing, namely shortages. I.e. if there is little stock in the system and demand grows in volume or mix, above the design parameters of the system, shortages will occur. Integrated MRP / JIT systems (see Materials Management and Stock Control) partially solved this problem by adding back a forecast, but did not really tackle the need to forecast by specifically targeting lead-time. Leanness should not be viewed as a prerequisite to agility since this would miss the opportunity to start work on the additional agile requirements. But agility has major implications for:

This level of flexibility cannot be achieved without:

A more comprehensive list is contained in our 92 point "Agile Manufacturing Self Diagnosis".

Examples of agile supply chain developments under this banner include:

Agile materials / capacity planning and control systems are a must. For this reason it is unlikely that over-sophisticated computer-based approaches will succeed over simple approaches. One of the mechanisms to achieve agility is the ability to provide forecasts throughout the supply chain of forthcoming demand without the buffering encountered in current supply chains. This is a significant challenge to the transparency of demand through the supply chain, without the intervention of inventory planners. For example the whole ethic of production planning is to create a stable plan for manufacturing to produce efficiently. Agility requires, not constant changes of plan to satisfy changing customer requirements, but very short lead-times. There is a switch of emphasis here from factory stability, to the customer need (not to be confused with the sales manager’s wishes). This has a major impact also on production planning and control whereby a product is earmarked for a particular customer fairly early on in the process so that customisation may proceed from that point. This is opposed to the techniques of aggregation connected with MRP systems and is more akin to a make-to-order environment albeit that one product may be very similar to the preceding one. An obvious prerequisite of course is that lead-times are short.

To join our research project on this subject and receive a free copy of our "Agile Manufacturing Self Diagnosis" Contact Us. (This service is only available to manufacturing businesses.)

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The following further best practice articles were also mentioned in this paper:

Lean Manufacturing

Lean Supply Chains

Just in Time

Materials Management and Stock Control

Business Process Re-engineering

Kanban

Demand management

MRP

Capacity Planning and control systems

Malpractice of the Week 005: Economic Batch Quantity EBQ / EOQ: The worst way to set batch sizes

A number of our training workshops deal with these topics individually, but the following courses provide solutions to Agile Manufacturing and Agile Supply Chain Management:

M15 Agile Manufacturing

SSC07 Strategic Supply Chain Management

S02 Business Process Reengineering

S03 Vision of a World Class Organisation

S04 Strategic Capacity Management

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To discuss your consulting or training needs with one of our independent consultants or trainers please Contact Us.

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Ó SM Thacker & Associates (Consultancy and Training Specialists) April 2000 v5 August 2007