How Agile Can Speed Up Your Manufacturing Change

Nothing in life exists in isolation, and this false partition of the fundamentals of best practice can lead to confusion and failure. Little wonder that both workforce and management are cynical about buzz words and distrust the latest ‘silver bullet’. So perhaps it is fitting that the latest evolution is occurring more as a natural progression, growing out of the lean shopfloor’s ability make changes quickly, and management’s ability to seize opportunity.

“I tend to see two types of company,” said Simon Griffiths, Head of MAS WM which helps manufacturing companies with business improvement. “There's the likes of the automotive and aerospace industries that have a conventional heartbeat: building X number of products per day within a limited although fairly large number of options. But we're seeing more and more companies picking up business because they are able to respond extremely quickly to the demand for totally new products, and this comes down to agility.” So what are the essential elements of agility?

According to Colin Herron, Manufacturing Productivity Manager at One North East, lean and agile are inextricable. “The base philosophy of lean must be there, without it the attempt to become agile will simply collapse.” Lean essentially makes agility possible, through organization and standardization of the workplace, through eliminating the chaos of inventory and work-in-progress on the shopfloor, and by continuously reducing changeover times through SMED (single minute exchange of die) and removing wasted time and effort from the process. Once these wastes are removed, the shopfloor is capable of moving quickly and changing products and processes within a short space of time.

Manufacturing technology plays a big part in this. The current generation of robotics and machine tools are fully programmable, says Keith Ridgway, Research Director at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), which makes them quick and easy to reconfigure. But perhaps the most exciting advances are speeding up new product design and introduction.

Rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing technology, for example, produce prototypes and small volumes of parts quickly straight from CAD, by building up successive layers of material using laser technology. “Virtual reality is also becoming much more widely used,” Ridgway said, “allowing engineers to examine a design and look for clashes, explore how it can be made or assembled, and see what the final product looks like,” thus addressing design and manufacture issues without having to build a physical prototype.

Agile must also stretch out into the supply chain. Nissan Sunderland demands a considerable level of agility from its embedded suppliers. “The seat manufacturer, for example, doesn’t know the specification of the seats until the car is on the production line,” Herron said. “They have two and a half to three hours to manufacture and deliver the seats in sequence, to order, to the line. There are three models of car on the same production line, and they deliver every 30 minutes.”

In this case, the supplier is linked directly to Nissan’s IT system, and receives exactly the same information as the assembly plant’s production line, informing them of the products and variations required in which sequence and timeslot.

IT is essentially the backbone that enables agility, and comes in the form of shopfloor scheduling, product lifecycle management for swift production introduction and end of life management, supply chain management and supply chain optimization, demand planning. The options are vast, and can be tailored to the specific needs of the company.

However, Andrew Kinder, Solutions Director for software company Infor, introduced a word of caution. “With the pace of business changing every quarter, and the pace of change of IT being measured in two or four year cycles, companies are sometimes constrained by the enterprise applications they have invested in.” And this is where systems based on service-oriented or component-based architecture can make a real difference. Assembled from individual pieces, any element can be updated, added or removed without the need to update the rest, creating much greater flexibility.

True agility, however, can only be spearheaded by the boardroom, where timely and well presented business information is vital. “It’s no coincidence that our most sought after application beyond ERP is business performance and business intelligence,” Kinder said. Tracking key performance indicators, it can present the information in an actionable format, and enable the board to make strategic decisions on real-time information.

Boardroom commitment is also essential for the success of a move towards agility. “It’s hard,” said Herron, “and takes a long time to get right. But most importantly it has to be led and driven from the very top – set out in a company strategy with key milestones, HR involved in training, and an agreed budget from finance. If you do that, the chances of success are quite high.” And the rewards will undoubtedly be enormous.