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Manufacturing managers nowadays agree that achieving low cost and high quality is no
longer enough to be successful, and really think that companies should concentrate on
flexibility as a way to achieve new forms of competitive advantage. Flexible factory will
be able to respond to customer orders quickly, provide broader product range and
introduce new products to the range easily.
The type of flexibility that the company emphasizes on should be determined by its
competitive environment. For example, product range means different things. Mobility
means a plants ability to change from making one product to making another. Finally, a
flexible plant is one that can perform comparably well when making any product within a
specified range (uniformity of performance).
According to the study, the author found out the following things. First, the degree of
computer integration in a plant was not itself associated with either increased range or
improved changeover times. Second, just because a factory is flexible in one way does not
mean it will naturally be flexible in others. Third, there is no clear link between the scale
of an operation and its ability to change swiftly between products. Fourth, workforce
experience affected different types of flexibility in different ways.
One of his surprising findings was that computer integration did not decrease the time
needed to switch from making one product to making another one, while the best
