Agility is easy, but effective agile manufacturing is not

Competitive advantage would be gained by those enterprises who are capable of responding rapidly to demand for highly customised, high quality products. The implication of this was that there would be a need to develop organisations and facilities which would be significantly more flexible and responsive than was then current. This requirement led to the concept of the "agile" as a differentiation from the "lean" organisation. This requirement for manufacturing to be able to respond to unique demands moves the balance back to the situation prior to the introduction of lean production, where manufacturing had to respond to whatever pressures were imposed on it, with the risks to cost and quality that this implies. The move to lean production, with its requirement for improvements in the support processes, has been a major task for many organisations to achieve. This paper discusses this balance between leanness and agility, questions how much agility is appropriate and how difficult might it be to achieve.