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Introduction
The globalisation of markets, growing interpenetration of economies and increased interdependence of economic agents are prompting farsighted companies to re-examine and modify their competitive strategies. Larger companies, powerful industries and whole economic trading blocks exert pressures from which small and medium-sized enterprises are not exempt (Ghobadian and Gallear, 1996). Continuous improvement effort needs to be coupled with an awareness of the pervasive changes in customer requirements, competitive factors and wider variations in the business environment. This paper discusses the development of agile manufacturing as a concept, separate from the lean manufacturing paradigm.
The original concept of agility was popularised in 1991 by the Iaccoca Institute of Lehigh University in USA (Kidd, 1994). The concept builds on the enduring features of previous paradigms of manufacturing from Taylorism, through, inter alia, MRP, JIT, WCM, OPT, TQM to Supply Chain Management and Lean Manufacturing (Voss, 1995). Academics agree that the concept is still only a vision and that further refinement is required. There is no company that can yet be said to be truly agile, if defined by characteristics emanating from the growing body of literature (Yusuf, Sarhadi and Gunasekaran, 1999; Dove, 1999). A review of the current definitions around agile will form part of this paper.
The underpinning principles of agility comprise: delivering value to the customer; being ready for change; valuing human knowledge and skills; and forming virtual partnerships. The first three of these are also attributes of lean manufacturing (Goldman, 1995). It is through a thorough review of the lean manufacturing paradigm, and particularly the limitations of it, that agile emerges as an enhancement and subsequently as a paradigm shift in its own right (Cusumano, 1994).
The assessment of the level or presence of agility in any manufacturing company through a definitive set of metrics is not possible at present. A staged assessment is therefore advocated. A concept is broken down into several principles, which, in turn, lead to practices and techniques that are the activities undertaken to change the organisation (Karlsson and Ahlstrom, 1997). Their study highlighted that the major studies were undertaken with large multinational companies, most commonly the automotive industry (Womack et al., 1990; Karlsson, 1992, Womack and Jones, 1994). This may seriously reduce the chances of developing broadly applicable...