Focusing Agility towards Small and Medium Scale Enterprises

To compete effectively in the global marketplace of the twenty-first century, manufacturing companies are trying to maintain a high level of flexibility and responsiveness to achieve agility and to remain competitive. Manufacturers are under tremendous pressure to improve productivity and quality while reducing costs. The new competition is in terms of reduced cost, improved quality products with higher performance, a wider range of products and better services all delivered simultaneously to enhance value to customers. In such environment providing good quality product at low cost for a medium scale industry has become very tough. To provide good quality product at low cost, small industries need a formulation of some manufacturing approaches like agile manufacturing to manufacture defect free products within their materials cost limit. Medium scale steel manufacturing industries like Magnum steel limited (MSL), banmore are facing problems of higher rejections in form of wastes so as to increase their cost. This paper aims to analyze the application of agile manufacturing in magnum steel limited in order to reduce wastages through implementing lean tools and techniques. An agility audit questionnaire is used for assessing the agility level of the company to identify the current level of performance within the company with respect to the key elements of agility. MSL"s agile experience is reported including a list of recommendation for improving its competitiveness to offer solution alternatives not only to the current problems but also to the ones that may be encountered in the future.

Asia Pacific Management and Business Application

After the COVID-19 pandemic, the manufacturing industry could quickly regain its performance. The question remains whether new ways of working (NWW) contribute to this adaptable behaviour of manufacturing employees. Implementing NWW techniques in manufacturing varies since the production process includes primary and secondary activities. Moreover, Psychological Empowerment plays a role in Workforce Agility in terms of employee sustainability as a human who requires intrinsic motivation to cope with any environment. This study surveyed 233 manufacturing employees in Indonesia and used SEM-PLS to determine the importance of applying NWW for manufacturing to attain its agility, particularly in the human factor. The results indicate that NWW has a positive effect on Workforce Agility. The authors conclude with discussions and the implications of implementing NWW in the industrial sector based on the supported proposed model.

2001

International Journal of Agile Systems and Management, 2007

Manufacturers in the 21st century enterprises have to cope with an increasingly dynamic and competitive environment. In order to function effectively within this environment, manufacturers have sought to apply a variety of principles, one of these umbrella groupings is agile manufacturing and incorporating the concepts of agility. However, adoption of agile manufacturing is not a trivial task with barriers existing throughout its life cycle spectrum, from development and implementation to its maintenance and improvement phases. ...

2016

From the beginning of the twenty-first century, manufacturing organizations have some challenges of new problems, in particular rapid changes in productions and customers' needs. These changes in almost production organizations may be increasingly known as treatment factors, so, they have developed new approaches to agile manufacturing in order to response the above challenges. One of the most effective ways for overcoming rapid changes is to apply team working procedures in which companies are facing with many problems and try to solve them with together. Therefore, the formation of effective teams is an undeniable necessity while team works are closely related to production planning. In the present paper, the concept of team works are discussed and show the relationship between them and their capabilities which cause to improve production agility in production companies. A conceptual model in which agility tools have been considered in the middle of the other concepts (team wo...

European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences, 2010

Changes in the business environment are leading firms to adopt a new production model termed agile manufacturing. 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 performance enhancements to become national and international leaders in an increasingly competitive market of fast changing customer requirements. The Methodology of this research is archiev type which exploited of various foreign articles and books. The results of this paper indicate that Responding to changes, and taking advantage of them through strategic utilisation of managerial and manufacturing methods and tools, are the pivotal concepts of agile manufacturing.

Customer needs as well as requirements are always in a continuous state of flux and more often than not, Manufacturing Companies find themselves in a quandary as they try to meet these. The inherent ability of Manufacturing Companies to meet the ever-changing customer requirements is key in ensuring that they are able to gain a competitive advantage over their counterparts as well as succeed in this highly volatile market. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as its noticeably widespread effects also brought about disruptive effects within an already turbulent environment as the Zimbabwean Manufacturing Sector was not spared the scourge of the pandemic. The organizations thus have to gain resilience so as to be able to thrive as well as grow competitively within their sector. The purpose of this paper was to assess how applicable the Agile Strategy is within the Zimbabwean Manufacturing sector as well as to come up with effective methods by which the strategy could be adopted by more organizations within the sector. The key drivers to the implementation of the strategy within these sectors as well as challenges associated with the implementation were also reviewed in depth.

Agile manufacturing is a technique which is implemented in an organisation that has created the ability to respond quickly to customer needs with irrespective of the processes, tools and training. These all are done at the same cost and quality. This paper discusses about the various industrial perspective aspects of several researchers on agile manufacturing. Further, the various models implemented by various researchers are discussed and a scope for the future research is suggested.

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2018

In the era of dynamic and customised demand, the organisations cannot be rigid. Rigidity can be reduced by adopting agile manufacturing paradigm. The objective of this study was to identify chief predictors of agile manufacturing and to distinguish agile developers and enablers. The survey-based study has been conducted to identify and pinpoint factors of agility to help managers to identify the areas to be focused. A hypothetical agile manufacturing framework has been proposed. The study indicates that nine hypothesised factors have statistically significant relationship with agility. Linear regression model has been developed to recognise agile manufacturing predictors. Linear regression model equation of agile manufacturing has been compared and tested with the mean value of agility. The results obtained from linear regression model and survey was found to be in close proximity. Further using principal component analysis, proposed empirical framework has been restructured as per empirical results of study.

Business Process …, 2003

This paper provides an exploration of the concept and content of agile manufacturing (AM). It describes the nature of the content of AM and synthesises the literature to propose a comprehensive definition of purpose and process. Real agile manufacturing (RAM) is viewed as a strategic process; it is about surviving and prospering in the competitive environment of continuous and unpredictable change by reacting quickly and effectively to changing markets. The paper argues that RAM is evolutionary, in that it is developed from existing systems of management and technologies. However, it is also revolutionary because the full application of RAM involves a departure from existing systems. RAM is shown to be based upon four fundamentals. First, each partner must benefit; thus multiple winners (manufacturers, suppliers, customers) is the objective. Second, integration (recourses, methods, technologies, departments or organisations) is the means of achieving RAM. Third, IT is demonstrated to be an essential condition. Finally, core competence is seen to be the key.