Addressing the Agile Manufacturing Drivers Using Interpretive Structural Modeling

Abstract

While manufacturing is very important in all aspects of today’s world, traditional manufacturing itself is not the perfect process to deal with the dynamic and continuous change of demand from customers. Responding quickly to their needs without compromising on quality and cost has been a challenging task in today’s cut-throat global market competition, driven by products and services tailored to consumers. Agile manufacturing methods have recently emerged as a new, faster and more efficient way to improve the manufacturing process compared to traditional manufacturing. With this, many drivers are organized and integrated into manufacturing in order to balance the customer satisfaction and profit yields and use this market change as an opportunity to make dominance over its competitors. Finally, the results obtained help industry managers to focus mainly on drivers who have improved agile performance better than on other things. In this project, we find a lot of assisting drivers for agile manufacturing, but only 16 of them are used for analysis. Interpretive structure modeling is used to identify relationships between these drivers. From these 16 selected drivers, some are significant. Top management support, training and education and IT integration and database management are important.