Industrial Engineering & Management

Shifting paradigms gave rise to agile manufacturing. The concept which was later applied at a broader level to organizations, workforce, and enterprise as well as supply chains. As trend of agility is being recognized as a necessary step to compete in the highly turbulent environment it becomes necessary to evaluate the agility of systems. As agility has no exact definition and subjected to individuals perception the evaluation of a system’s agility has been attempted with diverse approaches. This paper reviews various agility evaluation methods proposed and attempts to provide a holistic view of every method and draws out their advantages and limitations, in order to help in further research in this field.

This paper concerns the numerical characterization of the static strength of a flat stiffened panel, designed as a fiber metal laminates (FML) and made of Aluminium alloy and Fiber Glass FRP. The panel is full scale and was tested under static loads, applied by means of an in house designed and built multi-axial fatigue machine. The static test is simulated by the Finite Element Method (FEM) in a three-dimensional approach. The strain gauge outcomes are compared with corresponding numerical results, getting a satisfactory correlation.

This study investigates the mechanism through which IT affects performance using mediation analysis to determine if agility, the ability to sense and respond to changes in the market, explains “how” or “why” IT affects performance. The results of the mediation analysis are based on data collected from survey responses from 193 U.S. manufacturing firms. Agility as a mediator was investigated using three testing methods: causal steps strategy, product of coefficients, and bootstrapping. Causal steps strategy tested the direct effects using regression analysis, the product of coefficients tested the statistical significance of the mediation effects assuming the coefficients were normally distributed, and bootstrapping tested the significance of the mediation effects without assuming they were normally distributed by creating a distribution of the product of coefficients. The mediation effect using all three tests was demonstrated, providing a robust confirmation that agility mediates the impacts of IT on firm performance.

Value addition has only been measured as the difference between output and input prices and the critical roles of all functions in the process of value addition were not clearly known. Moreover, some core functions that inherently exist in the process of value addition were ignored until recently. The process of value addition and enhancement is continuous in its approach. Despite the fact that the value addition process is a continuous process, only its absolute measures were used for evaluating the intensity of value addition. Usually, value addition to a product was considered to happen only in the shop floor. In reality however, value addition is not only the responsibility of manufacturing function; rather, other functions before and after manufacturing also add significant tangible or intangible value to a product. The continuous characteristics of the value addition process can be visualized and evaluated in terms of the PDCA continuous process cycle so that value addition can be enhanced in a continuous basis. The PDCA cycle is a renowned continuous quality improvement approach and has been widely used by many successful companies as a strategic weapon for enhancing organizational performance. Hence, this paper roots its core idea towards the conceptual design of continuous value addition process using the PDCA cycle. The study also intends to identify the potential functions that were ignored and their respective roles. Thus, six core functions in the value addition process are identified and categorized into the four distinct phases of the PDCA cycle. The findings of this paper will, at large, help academicians and practitioners care for the respective roles of functions in the process of value addition and easily know how these functions interact in a continuous basis.