Manufacturing Enterprise Agility

An evolutionary transformation of business environment, with change as a main characteristic, is take place. Manufacturing companies, even those operating in relatively stable conditions with good market positions, are facing rapid and often unanticipated changes in their business environment. Agile manufacturing is proposed in response to the circumstance as a solution. Every enterprise takes increasing agility to response the market as its goal, in order to gain competitive opportunity. The measure of agility is significant to implement the philosophy of agile manufacturing. We can know the level of agility required and that the company already has, and then the difference between them may be analyzed to determine whether the company need improve urgently its agility, and the factors of effecting agility in market may be analyzed to learn the aspects which should be improved. The concept of agile manufacturing and agility was summarized and four typical systems of agility measuring were analyzed and compared in the paper. And then a model of researching agility measure is proposed based on the model of agility concept proposed by Sharifi and Zhang. Based on the model, a system of agility measuring was given. In the system, use the method of marketing research connected with statistical analysis to research agility of manufacturing organization, and data collected from applications are used to validate the method. This paper provides a brief summary of the system of agility measuring, and details its implementation in a manufacturing company, and then practices are proposed to develop.