What Really Makes Factories Flexible?
Manufacturing managers in a broad array of industries agree that achieving low cost and high quality is no longer enough to guarantee success. In the face of fierce, low-cost competition and an army of high-quality suppliers, companies are increasingly concentrating on flexibility as a way to achieve new forms of competitive advantage. The flexible factory, they hope, will enable them to respond to customer orders quickly, provide a broad product range, or introduce new products to the range effortlessly. The push to make factories more flexible has been spreading throughout manufacturing and currently is even permeating industries such as chemicals and paper, in which the assumption for decades has been that the plants with the longest production runs are typically the most competitive. Having acknowledged the importance of flexibility, managers in industry after industry are finding it frustratingly difficult to improve. Some have organized cross-functional teams in the hope that new
