Fundamental Theoretical And Empirical Study On Manufacturing Flexibility

The economical globalization and the development of information technology make the environment that Chinese enterprises survive in changes acutely. How to survive in the fiercely changing environment and to obtain the development is the question which the enterprise must have to consider. In the process of related scientific research, the business circles personage commonly reflects the significance to answer enterprise environment change and their degree of difficulty. So it is valuable to study how enterprise answers the environment change. The main body of this paper is exactly to study how enterprise answers enterprise environment change, focus point is how to apply manufacturing flexibility to go to answer environment change.Since the history of our country's market economy is short, our enterprise are lack of experiences of acute changes neither , so industry and academic circles are short comparatively to know how to answer the enterprise environment change. To be compared, research to this problem in the developed country already has longer history , research result is also more comparatively, therefore the main body of this paper depend on foreign literature, get out knowledge from it and put into use for our country enterpriseThe main purpose of this paper is to tidy up the related content about manufacturing flexibility, analyze the theory system,and construct the knowledge hierarchy of manufacturing flexibility, to help our country enterprise use the theory and keep life-force and have development. The main method is literature reviewing, theoretical analyzing and case analyzing. Because of the studying time is restricted, the paper mainly use literature reviewing and theoretical analyzing, experience study will be conducted to examine the theory. The work to perfect the theory and to conduct experience study is the future work of this study.The paper first analyzes the concept of flexibility. It is not the manufacturing function flexibility, but the flexibility over all enterprise. So this paper discusses the flexibility of the whole manufacturing enterprise. Through analyzing related literature, research route was found, and following this route, theoretical analyzing work was done and conclusions was found, putting related conclusions together to form the knowledge body of manufacturing flexibility.The concept of enterprise environment is a important concept. This paper unifies divergent concept, and gives a clear meaning of enterprise environment. Based on this, the relationship between enterprise and enterprise environment is discussed to prove the importance of reacting to environment change.There two main points about flexibility meaning: reacting to the change of environment or reacting to the uncertainty of environment. This paper analyses exactly the meaning of enterprise environment change and enterprise environment uncertainty and forms unique viewpoint. Based on this analysis, three methods to react to enterprise environment change are given as follows: no change to react to change,change within flexibility to react to change and transform to react to change. A model concerning how to react to enterprise environment change is constructed, in this model, the corresponding relationship between enterprise environment uncertainty and enterprise flexibility.Through tidying up the discussions above, the concept of manufacturing flexibility is given, and the characters of manufacturing flexibility are given too. Through reviewing related models in literature, this paper conducts flexibility-constructing model and flexibility-using model.Research about flexibility dimensions is important, and gets concerns from scholars in this field. This paper finds a new angle of view to analyze this issue: need and supply of flexibility. Flexibility elements is an important issue too, discussion about this issue contributes to measuring flexibility dimensions.At last, a case is analyzed, and a questionnaire is designed and distributed, 30 shares of questionnaire are taken back, this date helps me to describe the level of manufacturing flexibility of the stylebook.In our country, manufacturing flexibility is a new study, and it is lack of systemic research. There is huge research potential. This paper concentrates on fundamental theory of manufacturing flexibility; experience study on related issues is the key of future research.