Flexibility in manufacturing enterprises

Abstract

A manufacturing enterprise is a collection of interrelated, flexible, optimized business processes delivering value to the customers through high quality products and services, faster than competition. This view of an enterprise enables one to consider the entire business system including the suppliers, product development, manufacturing, logistics, distribution, and retailing and to smoothen out the interfaces between them. Performance measures and performance measurement are important for monitoring, control and management. We identify and discuss eight performance measures for generic business processes. These include lead time, customer service, dependability, quality, flexibility, cost, capacity, and asset utilization. In this paper, we concentrate on flexibility of business processes with special emphasis on the supply chain and order-to-delivery processes. We attempt to provide clear definitions and measures of various types of flexibilities as well as discuss the relationship between product structure and supply chain flexibility. The relationship between uncertainties, flexibility, technology, and product structure is clearly brought out in this paper.