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Abstract
Purpose - This short paper seeks to explain why the original paper "The flexibility of manufacturing systems" was written (1987), and attempts to examine at least some of the flexibility literature that has followed.
Design/methodology/approach - The approach is a review and observations about the 1987 work.
Findings - The original paper treated flexibility in an exclusively manufacturing context. Even in the mid-1980s one could argue that this was a mistake. If flexibility is an important concept in operations management, it should be explored in all types of operation, not just in manufacturing. Now, more than 80 per cent of economic activity and employment occurs in non-manufacturing enterprises. Flexibility is no different from most other topics in operations in that it is unreasonably skewed towards the manufacturing sector, it would nevertheless benefit from more empirical and conceptual work in the context of service operations.
Originality/value - Provides a useful update on an author's findings from two decades ago.
Keywords Flexible manufacturing systems, Manufacturing industries
Paper type General review
Operations flexibility has never been a difficult attribute to justify. No one likes to be thought rigid, especially in a business function such as operations that has traditionally suffered a reputation for its sometimes unbending attitude to change. Flexibility allows operations to increase the scope for a firm's market positioning. This was probably true in 1985 when the research for the original paper was carried out. It is even more so now when markets are perceived to be more turbulent, faster moving, more competitive, or all three. That is why flexibility has retained its position as an important topic in the, now far more extensive, operations literature. Certainly, how the topic is treated has changed. There is far less concern with defining what flexibility is, and more with its role as a core operations competence that, over the long-term, can be exploited in almost any market context. Flexibility has come to occupy a central position in how operations can be strategically developed to play an effective part in achieving competitive advantage.
This short paper has a number of objectives, some justifiable in terms of setting the original paper in an updated context, and some purely self-indulgent in the sense that they allow a certain nostalgia...