Much has been written in recent years about flexible factories and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), but the literature has been largely theoretical; managers who are interested in making their factories more flexible have little empirical research on which to base their decisions. In particular, a number of questions have yet to be answered: What are the types of flexibility that affect a company’s competitive position? How can different types of flexibility be achieved? What kinds of tradeoffs must managers make between flexibility and productivity, quality, or other performance dimensions?
To address some of these questions, we studied thirty-one printed circuit board (PCB) plants belonging to fourteen electronics firms in the United States, Japan, and Europe.1 Although our data originates from only one industry, we believe they have important implications for manufacturers elsewhere. Specifically, our research has implications for plant automation, worker participation, relationships with suppliers, wage schemes, and component reusability. We found significant relationships among different types of flexibility and discovered that increased flexibility in certain areas had no adverse quality and cost effects. In this paper, we propose a framework for incorporating flexibility into mainstream strategy analysis, describe our research, and explain our findings.
Flexibility and Strategy
The literature on manufacturing flexibility that we used as background is divided into two areas: analytical models and empirical studies. The analytical models have come almost... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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