Agile manufacturing
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Agile manufacturing is a term applied to an organization that has created the processes, tools, and training to enable it to respond quickly to customer needs and market changes while still controlling costs and quality.
An enabling factor in becoming an agile manufacturer has been the development of manufacturing support technology that allows the marketers, the designers and the production personnel to share a common database of parts and products, to share data on production capacities and problems — particularly where small initial problems may have larger downstream effects. It is a general proposition of manufacturing that the cost of correcting quality issues increases as the problem moves downstream, so that it is cheaper to correct quality problems at the earliest possible point in the process.
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[edit] Background
[edit] Key attributes
Goldman et al. suggest that Agility has four underlying components:
- delivering value to the customer;
- being ready for change;
- valuing human knowledge and skills;
- forming virtual partnerships.
The first three of these are also attributes of lean manufacturing.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- L. Goldman, R.L. Nagel and K Preiss, Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations - Strategies for Enriching the Customer, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995.
