Lean and Agile Performance Framework for Manufacturing Enterprises

Abstract

The overall performance of a manufacturing organization is a drastic function of the strategies applied to its physical sectors. Traditional strategies were based on the principle of economies of scale, which resulted in excess of waste and difficulty of reconfiguration. Global competition necessitates formulating efficient and effective paradigms in response to the global economies to improve the overall performance. Lean and agile manufacturing have been widely adopted in recent years’ enterprises. Leanness mainly leads to eliminating the non-value added activities while agility focuses on leads to market responsiveness. This paper discusses the leanness and agility definitions, factors, paradigms, differences, and combination. A hierarchic framework is presented which can be used to measure the leanness, agility, leagility, and overall performance of an enterprise, further, to compare different enterprises. This enables using the multi-criteria decision making methods especially AHP and ANP. Levels of leanness and agility can be fed as input to define a variety of enterprises. Moreover, a different view is introduced for general features of an efficient/effective manufacturing organization irrespective to the definitions of leanness and agility.