A REVIEW OF AGILE ORGANIZATIONS AND FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING WITH A CASE STUDY

Abstract

ABSTRACT Life has become very complex. The world is facing innumerable problems like population explosion, Natural and manmade calamities, dipping economy, dwindling opportunities for education, health and employment, collapse of values and layoff of thousands of qualified and able workers by several organizations. In other words, it is a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world. The World GDP Growth rate has decreased from 10% in 1980 to approximately 2% in 2017. One of the remedies to these problems is improving the World’s economy and creating more opportunities for people to earn their livelihood, live a healthy and contended life without further degradation in the values and environment. This is where agile organizations and flexible manufacturing come to the focus. The buzz word for today’s organizations is "agility". Agility is a trait that is well liked by all. Whether it is Biological Systems, Social Systems, Manufacturing Systems, Psychological systems, Computing Systems or Consciousness systems all thrive when there is agility. Further it can be inferred that if one is agile one can even shape his own future. A brief review of agile organizations and Flexible manufacturing is attempted here. At the end two case studies are presented on Lava mobiles and LTA technologies as examples of agile organizations implementing flexible manufacturing. Keywords Agility, Flexible Manufacturing, VUCA