Agile enterprise strategy: a next generation manufacturing concept

Agility as a subject is still a developing area. Companies are starting to move towards agile behaviour, but as the move is often unplanned it tends to be operational and to lack strategic direction. As a first step, companies need to understand the basic ideas and become intelligent respondents to the concepts. Agility is a long term issue for businesses; achieving agility is a journey, not an objective to be attained before moving on to something else. Although embryonic examples of agility can now be found in industry, the implementation of agility is still very much a frontier activity, involving radically new concepts concerning strategies, organisation, people and technologies. It takes businesses into a domain where fundamental and taken for granted assumptions are challenged. Agility is a paradigm shift and before one can move forwards one has to understand the existing paradigm and to face up to the often painful task of accepting that current practices and beliefs are no longer appropriate or relevant. This in itself, is a major change exercise, but one that is vital to the successful development of agile capabilities.