Agile Manufacturing is a modern production approach that enables companies to respond swiftly and flexibly to market changes while maintaining quality and cost control.
This methodology is designed to create systems that can adapt dynamically to changing customer demands and external factors such as market trends or supply chain disruptions.
[1] The goal is to create a manufacturing system that can quickly and efficiently respond to changes in customer preferences, market trends and other external factors.
Another enabling factor for it is the increase in global competition amid market changes and diminishing national barriers.
[3] Core competence is derived from corporate wide learning process, integration of diverse skills and streams of technologies, work organization, creation and delivery of value and capability of inter organizational cooperation.
[4] For strategic importance and long-term benefits, core competence should provide multi-venturing capability, access to a wide market spectrum, enrich customer valuing, and be difficult for competitors to copy.
The stages are as follows A virtual partnerships enables harnessing and coordination of resources and diverse skills for manufacturing products quickly and facilitates customer involvement in the web of firms.
Furthermore there is a need for techniques to manage companies promoting workforce initiative and performance measures for self-directed, inter-enterprise project teams.
There is still a lack of clarity on how to become agile, with insufficiently developed mindset, underdeveloped business practices, processes, methods and tools.
Agile enterprises need to be able shift focus, diversify and configure and re align their business to serve a particular purpose rapidly since windows of opportunities do not stay open for long.
"The ability to control the new product introduction process from the conceptualization and design stages through manufacturing to shipment and product support requires the exploitation of a knowledge-rich work force and sophisticated information technology in most industrial sectors"[11] This concept is closely related to lean manufacturing, in which the goal is to reduce waste as much as possible.
Agile manufacturing can include this concept, but it also adds an additional dimension, the idea that customer demands need to be met rapidly and effectively.
They can retool facilities quickly, negotiate new agreements with suppliers and other partners in response to changing market forces, and take other steps to meet customer demands.
Another approach was developed combining the attributes of agility together with leanness across one supply chain is the hybrid lean-agile strategy.
This blended lean-agile strategy hybridizes attributes of leanness (cost minimization, waste reduction, continuous improvement), agility (speed, flexibility, responsiveness) and leagility (mass customization, postponement) in one supply network.