Agile manufacturing: The drivers, concepts and attributes

Agile manufacturing, a recently popularised concept, has been advocated as the 21st century manufacturing paradigm. It is seen as the winning strategy to be adopted by manufacturers bracing. themselves for dramatic performanc e enhancements to become national and international leaders in an increasin gly competitive market of fast changing customer requirements. This paper i dentifies the drivers of agility and discusses the portfolio of competitive advantages that have emerged over time as a result of the changing require ments of manufacturing. The need to achieve the competitive advantages of m anufacturing in synergy and without trade-offs is fundamental to the agile paradigm. To further the understanding of agility, this paper reviews the m eaning of agility from different perspectives and suggests a comprehensive definition which can be adopted as a working definition by practitioners. F our underlining concepts of agility has emerged from the working definition and the paper presents a representation of these concepts and their intera ctions. Finally, the paper highlights some of the key enablers of agility a nd identifies potential future research directions. (C) 1999 Elsevier Scien ce B.V. All rights reserved.