Enablers
Strategic Planning
By gaining knowledge about all areas of engineering, it takes into consideration the long term interest of the company in finding suitable business. To achieve agility in manufacturing, several strategies and plans are needed. For example:
- Virtual Enterprise
- Rapid-Partnership formation
- Rapid Prototyping
- Temporary alliances based on core competencies.
- Customer-integrated Multidisciplinary teams
- Supply chain partners
- Flexible manufacturing
- Computer Integrated information systems
- Modular Production facilities
Product Design
Agile manufacturing requires a rapid product design system with the aim of changing over to new products as quickly as possible. This, in turn, needs a system to group different resources and products to reduce the non-value adding activities and hence reduce the time to reach market with the right products and at the right time.
Virtual Enterprise (Rapid Partnership)
By combining with a number of carefully chosen organizations with similar supply chains, the combination of complementary core abilities are spread among them concentrating on speed to market, cost reduction and quality. Temporary partnerships will also help to improve the flexibility and awareness. Communication, training and education, and goal
deployment are important for effective coordination and integration of participating firms at various level of cooperation.
Automation and Information Technology
Agile manufacturing needs intelligent sensing and decision-making systems capable of automatically carrying out many tasks conventionally executed by humans. It also requires agile-enabling technologies such as
virtual machine tools, flexible fixturing and agile design substitutes. The
systems for automation should include mostly software/decision systems for numerous
planning and control operations including
- Materials requirements planning
- Design
- Manufacturing resource planning
- Scheduling and production planning
- Control
Concurrent Engineering
In order to reduce lead times and improve the quality and cost of the products, high level of communication, work practices and workers' training are important. People, processes and functions have to work parallel to each other to allow work to be completed in the minimum time possible. This so called rapid response.
Rapid Prototyping
A prototype is a preliminary model of a solution that users within a company can implement and analyse. This prototype is done rapidly and cheaply in a number of days and then a group of users try it out to see its performance. With the results acquired, the prototype can be modified and optimized until all the customer’s wants are covered. Rapid Prototyping reduces the time to market since the firm can check that the designs meet the customer’s need without any waste, and so, loss of time
Electronic Commerce
The use of computers and other devices has enabled companies to exchange information between themselves, within each company, with government departments and with banks. Business documents such as invoices, bills and purchase orders can be exchanged online which saves money and time when compared to data entry on paper and other paperwork. Using the internet, companies can go worldwide and assist customers by improving significantly the response time through online systems.