Agile manufacturing is a term applied to an organization that has created the processes, tools, and training to enable it to respond

quickly to customer needs and market changes while still controlling costs and quality. An enabling factor in becoming an agile manufacturer has been the development of manufacturing support technology that allows the marketers, the designers and the production personnel to share a common database of parts and products, to share data on production capacities and problems particularly where small initial problems may have larger downstream effects. It is a general proposition of manufacturing that the cost of correcting quality issues increases as the problem moves downstream, so that it is cheaper to correct quality problems at the earliest possible point in the process. Agile manufacturing is seen as the next step after LEAN in the evolution of production methodical. The key difference between the two is like between a thin and an athletic person, agile being the latter. One can be neither, one or both. In manufacturing theory being both is often referred to as leagile. According to Martin Christopher, when companies have to decide what to be, they have to look at the Customer Order Cycle (the time the customers are willing to wait) and the leadtime for getting supplies. If the supplier has a short lead time, lean production is possible. If the customer order cycle is short, agile production is beneficial. Lean or world class manufacturing is being very good at doing the things you can control. Agile manufacturing deals with the things you can NOT control. Agility is the ability to thrive and prosper in an environment of constant and unpredictable change. Here are a few of the reasons that the manufacturing paradigm is changing from mass production to agile manufacturing:

Global competition is intensifying. Mass markets are fragmenting into niche markets. Cooperation among companies is becoming necessary, including companies who are in direct competition with each other. Customers expect low volume, high quality, custom products. Very short product life-cycles, development time, and production lead times are required. Customers want to be treated as individuals.

The swift trend towards a multiplicity of finished products with short development and production lead times has lead many companies into problems with inventories, overheads, and inefficiencies. They are trying to apply the traditional mass-production approach without realizing that the whole environment has changed. Mass production does not apply to products where the customers require small quantities of highly custom, design-to-order products, and where additional services and value-added benefits like product upgrades and future reconfigurations are as important as the product itself. Approaches such as Rapid prototyping (RP), rapid tooling (RT), and reverse engineering are helping to solve some of these problems.

Rapid Prototyping - Rapid prototyping is a relatively new class of technology used for building physical models and prototype parts from 3D computer-aided design (CAD) data. Unlike milling machines (which are subtractive in nature), RP systems join together liquid, powder and sheet materials to form complex parts. Layer by layer, RP machines fabricate plastic, wood, ceramic, and metal objects based on thin horizontal cross sections taken from a computer model. Rapid Tooling - Rapid tooling falls into two categories: 1) advanced methods of making tools using RP technology, an additive process, and 2) advanced methods of making tools using milling technology, a subtractive process. Both are driven from a digital database, which is the key to making it rapid. RP-driven RT accelerates the tool-making process using RP masters that are, in turn, used to produce molds. Reverse Engineering - Reverse engineering encompasses a variety of approaches to reproducing a physical object with the aid of drawings, documentation, or computer model data. In the broadest sense, reverse engineering is whatever it takesmanual or under computer controlto reproduce something.