Agility is often mentioned as a key to competitive advantage and business success. Agile approach is more commonly associated with computing, but it can also be referred to as a manufacturing methodology.
What is agile manufacturing all about and could your business benefit from it? This guide will explain the concept of agile manufacturing, the key elements of the method and provide you tips on how to implement an agile manufacturing plan for your organisation. Finally, we’ll explore the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.
What is agile manufacturing?
Agile manufacturing is essentially about an approach a manufacturing company takes towards manufacturing products. It looks at the processes, tools and training the company is using in order to respond customer needs and market changes.
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While both lean and agile manufacturing can help companies lower costs, improve customer service and boost responsiveness, there are certain differences to these methodologies.
Lean manufacturing is focused on minimising the costs of manufacturing. The focus is therefore on demand-based manufacturing, which aims to eliminate investment in inventory. Lean manufacturing involves with improving the effective use of utilities, facilities and materials. The process is driven by the mindset that the processes can be constantly improved to make manufacturing more cost efficient. Therefore, lean manufacturing emphasises improvement and the measurement of performance.
You could view both models through the analogy of a person. One could be a thin person or one could be a fit person. These two are not the same thing, although a person can also be thin and fit. Similarly, an organisation can be a lean or an agile manufacturer, or the company could become
The method of Lean Six Sigma is the combination of two business techniques that includes Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma. Lean manufacturing focuses on improving the flow of the organization by training highly skilled employees to increase the overall speed while Six Sigma focuses on improving current performance and overall accuracy. In most cases, blending both Lean and Six Sigma can be costly; however the end result can have create an organization that focuses on quality, accuracy, and speed to meet the goal which is profitability.
Flexibility: The basis of agile is to accommodate change as software related projects are constantly changing. If there were a change in market or the emergence of a new product, the product could be easily updated. It also enables new ideas and innovation to be implemented mid-project even after the scope has been defined.
According to Christopher and Towill (2001), there are mainly three ways to combine lean and leagile. The first hybrid approach is the Pareto rule, which means that the dominant 20% of products should use leanness and make to stock. While the remaining 80% products with less share of revenue should use agility. The second hybrid approach is about using lean approach for the base level of demand, while for the peak season or flexible demand, manufacturer can use agility
Achieving quality of conformance involved conform to specifications that involve providing customers with a quality product at the right price which accounts for the cost of materials. In order for a company to achieve and produce a successful product that customers want and need, it is vital that quality management and lean systems play front row. Quality management helps organizations to reduce waste and inventory. “Lean is about challenging the way things are done and opening our eyes to that waste and inefficiency” (Lean Benefits - Benefits of Lean, Why Lean is Important, 2015). Within each of these concepts are important tool and techniques that organizations can use to achieve a quality product. In this paper I will discuss “cost of quality” from the quality management side and “kaizen’s” from the lean system side, while discussing how each of these concepts are implemented into my own life or
The final part of this essay will be to examine the similarities and differences between the two models.
Rather than the long drawn out release cycles in the previously popular waterfall methodology, the agile methodology suggests regular short sprint release cycles called iteration. This allows the customers and stakeholders to have more involvement within the software development process. The iterative approach has become vastly effective in helping software developers improve their skills in estimating schedule for remaining tasks. Schedule estimation is one of the most difficult responsibilities for developers because software issues are common and are unpredictable by nature. By breaking the large requirements down into more manageable sub requirements, the agile process naturally promotes better estimation [1]. Agile methods are people-oriented rather than process-oriented, Qumer and Hender-son-Sellers [2] offer the following definition for the agility method: ‘‘A software development method is said to be an agile software development method when a method is people focused, communications-oriented, flexible (ready to adapt to expected or unexpected change at any time), speedy (encourages rapid and iterative development of the product in small releases), lean (focuses on shortening time frame and cost and on improved quality), responsive (reacts appropriately to expected and unexpected changes), and learning (focuses on improvement during and after product
A LEAN Company is our best description and our business philosophy (creating more value for customers with less resources), which pursues to deliver what the customer wants, when they want it, at maximum value with minimum misuse.Through the application of LEAN, we achieve more fulfillment as it helps to reduce the possibility to constantly be fighting a battle against difficulties. Besides, we promote a Continuous Improvement Culture in our performance.
Scrum is basically a framework for agile development. Scrum is a process that is used most of the time during complex projects in software development. It is also a simple yet affective way to manage work. The strategy in Scrum is to divide members into a team and have them work together to achieve a common goal or project. Scrum provokes communication between the members of the teams. This communication is imperative to the success of the project.
As per Boehm and Turner concepts of balancing agility and Discipline six exemplary conclusions were made, of which first one is that neither agile nor plan-driven processes and methods provide a silver bullet which implies that either of the agile or plan-driven approach is not applicable in all situations. Both the processes deals with the essential software engineering complications like complexity, changeability, invisibility and conformity while both the processes have its own advantages and disadvantages. Agile method to some extent achieves changeability and invisibility as the project’s strategies and its implementation is discussed and shared among all the members of a team whereas it fizzles to handle complexity of the project and conformity. Also agile method fails in scaling up to large complex projects. Plan driven concepts handle conformity and invisibility as thorough documentation and extensive planning is done. But it fails in handling changeability as it is difficult to do re-documentation every time and also fails to handle increasing complexity as new systems are added which involves enterprise integration. Hence it can be said that neither agile nor plan-driven processes provide silver bullets instead they can be termed as lead bullets individually.
Agile has many advantages. Firstly, rather than emphasising the importance of processes and tools, agile advocates teamwork. It focuses on customer interaction through fast and continuous software components delivery. In a large sense, agile is people oriented. It enhances communication from all stakeholders, such as clients, developers and testers. Secondly, due to the nature of agile, frequent adaptation to changing environments can be made. Thus, agile is a synonym of flexibility. Thirdly, agile as a very practical approach has minimum requirements for documentation so it can realize functionality quickly. This saves lots of time for developers and analysts. Last but not least, since testing is done throughout the entire lifecycle, the quality of application is guaranteed (Agilemethodologyorg,
A perceptive company with an ‘agile’ system can rapidly identify an alteration in the environment and gather useful information to quickly respond and avoid a major internal impact. This agility to quickly r...
When comparing and contrasting waterfall and agile, they both use the same type of building blocks for the project: scope, cost, schedule and performance. They both also analyze, design, build, test, and deploy the requirement needed for the end result. The difference in these terms for each method is that when using waterfall for scope, cost, schedule, and performance, it sets the scope up front and then allows the cost, schedule, and performance to change depending on what is needed. An agile method will set the cost, schedule, and performance upfront and then have the scope vary, depending on what the company’s requests are after a working prototype. The waterfall is an iterative method meaning the next step cannot begin until the current one is completed. Once the current step is completed, it cannot be revised in anyway unless the project is scrapped and begin again. If the waterfall method is chosen, then the project team
Agile development is chosen when the requirements are not clear. This is the reason that it is chosen for the projects where the rate of risk is high. Agile software development is best for the projects where the project can be divided in mini projects and these mini projects are completed by passing through the phase of design, coding and testing. The results of these iterations clear the requirements gradually. The feedback from the customers also clears the requirements. This is the reason that most of the companies use agile development methodology because of the fact that it has the capability to adapt to difficult situation and chase strict deadlines. Agile method is being used all over the software industry. Most of the developers are aware of the fact that Agile methodology is best for them.
[1] In agile software development, requirements and solutions are developed through collaboration between self-organizing and cross-functional teams, which utilize the appropriate practices for their context. Agile software development promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change. [2]Among its promotions, early delivery and continuous improvement can be realized through Continuous
The main idea is to fulfill the internal or external customer’s wants. Through lean thinking, it is hoping that nonmanufacturing company’s can provides value to the customers with minimum cost, effort and can save time. Thus, it will lead to improve performance and optimum utilization of the company’s additional capacity and resources.