Agile Manufacturing should primarily be seen as a business concept. Its aim is quite simple - to put our enterprises way out in front of our primary competitors. In Agile Manufacturing our aim is to develop agile properties. We will then use this agility for competitive advantage, by being able to rapidly respond to changes occurring in the market environment and through our ability to use and exploit a fundamental resource -knowledge.
One fundamental idea in the exploitation of this resource is the idea of using technologies to lever the skills and knowledge of our people. We need to bring our people together, in dynamic teams formed around clearly identified market opportunities, so that it becomes possible to lever one another's knowledge. Through these processes we should seek to achieve the transformation of knowledge and ideas into new products and services, as well as improvements to our existing products and services.
The concept of Agile Manufacturing is also built around the synthesis of a number of enterprises that each have some core skills or competencies which they bring to a joint venturing operation, which is based on using each partners facilities and resources. For this reason, these joint venture enterprises are called virtual corporations, because they do not own significant capital resources of their own. This, it is believed, will help them to be agile, as they can be formed and changed very rapidly.
Central to the ability to form these joint ventures is the deployment of advanced information technologies and the development of highly nimble organisational structures to support highly skilled, knowledgeable and empowered people.
Agile Manufacturing enterprises are expected to be capable of rapidly responding to changes in customer demand. They should be able to take advantage of the windows of opportunities that, from time to time, appear in the market place. With Agile Manufacturing we should also develop new ways of interacting with our customers and suppliers. Our customers will not only be able to gain access to our products and services, but will also be able to easily assess and exploit our competencies, so enabling them to use these competencies to achieve the things that they are seeking.