Abstract:

The need for organisations to be flexible to meet the rapidly changing requirements of their customers is now well appreciated and can be witnessed within companies with their use of techniques such as single-minute exchange of die (SMED) for machine change-over or Kanban as the visual production and inventory control for Just-in-time manufacture and delivery. What is not so well appreciated by companies is the need for agility. Put simply it is the need to be alert for a new and unexpected opportunity and quick to respond with the changes necessary in order to profit from it.   This paper will describe ongoing research into the characteristics of Agility. Research that has led to the development of a questionnaire which identifies the key areas of agility and that is designed to identify, for participating organisations, the degree to which they already possess the characteristics of agility. This paper will report on the preliminary findings from the responses received from the use of this questionnaire in a survey of over hundred small and medium sized manufacturing organisations (SME’s) and will hypothesize on how the information that this has provided can be used to develop a methodology for assisting SME’s in improving their future competitiveness by becoming more agile.