Principles
Four important design strategies in agile manufacturing
- Enriching the customer
- Co-operating to enhance competitiveness
- Organizing to master change and uncertainty
- Leveraging the impact of people and information
Enriching the customer
For a successful manufacturing company using agile manufacturing, one of the most important principle is to enrich the customer by identifying, monitoring and understanding
approaches such as Quality Function Deployment. it is of vital importance to satisfy the customers’ demands and listen to the voice of the customer by adopting customer focused philosophies and manufacturing.
Co-Operating to enhance competitiveness
It is key for companies to form partnering firms within a physically distributed or victual manufacturing enterprise. Furthermore, it would be crucial for a company
to choose in the desired place where to set the companies goals in the quadrant (as seen in the figure) to differentiate itself from the competitors. Having this in mind, it is important for a company to adopt adaptability
measures that ease change.
Organizing to master change and uncertainty
To have the proper organization and flexibility is one of the prime objectives of an agile company in order to thrive on change and uncertainty and respond effectively to changing circumstances and problems - for example planning without knowing the future which results in plant expansion or planning for potential customers.
Leveraging the impact of people and information
The most integral part for agile manufacturing are the people since they possess the skills, initiation and information to strive for agility and without a doubt it is wise for companies to invest in human capital. Assigning
a leader would be a company’s most prized asset since it would be the leader’s
responsibility to choose the most optimal path to advance, introduce new
approaches, make existing approaches obsolete, out of box thinking and disrupts
the market. It is also important for companies to keep up to
date with the advancements in technology and
to invest in manufacturing prototypes.