A GOODNESS TEST FOR OPERATIONAL MEASURES OF MANUFACTURING FLEXIBILITY

After more than a decade of research on measurement of manufacturing f lexibility, it is now recognized that measures of flexibility are, by their very nature, user- and/or situation-specific. In such an environ ment, a set of principles that could be used by practitioners to test the goodness of metrics which they devise (to suit the requirements of their particular application) will be most useful. This article fulfi lls the above stated need by developing such a test. This test is then applied to some flexibility measures suggested in recent studies, and their strengths and/or weaknesses are pointed out.