AGILE MANUFACTURING - ENABLERS AND AN IMPLEMENTATION FRAMEWORK

Tougher competitive situations have led to increasing attention being paid to customer satisfaction, of which timely and customized services are the key concepts. As the product life cycle becomes shortened, hi gh product quality becomes necessary for survival. Markets become high ly diversified and global, and continuous and unexpected change become the key factors for success. The need for a method of rapidly and cos t-effectively developing products, production facilities and supportin g software, including design, process planning and shop floor control system has led to the concept of agile manufacturing. Agile manufactur ing can be defined as the capability to survive and prosper in a compe titive environment of continuous and unpredictable change by reacting quickly and effectively to changing markets, driven by customer-design ed products and services. This article details the key concepts and en ablers of agile manufacturing. The key enablers of agile manufacturing include: (i) virtual enterprise formation tools/metrics; (ii) physica lly distributed manufacturing architecture and teams; (iii) rapid part nership formation tools/metrics; (iv) concurrent engineering; (v) inte grated product/production/business information system; (vi) rapid prot otyping tools; and (vii) electronic commerce. A conceptual framework f or the development of an agile manufacturing system and future researc h directions are presented in this paper. This framework takes into ac count the customization and system integration with the help of busine ss process redesign, legal issues, concurrent engineering, computer-in tegrated manufacturing, cost management, total quality management and information technology.