A metric for agility measurement in product development

The achievement of lower product cycle times requires the use of a multidimensional agility measure. In addition to quantifying a manufacturers ability to respond quickly and cost effectively to sudden unexpected changes in customer demands, this measure should be able to guide the concurrent engineering effort. Such a measure is described in this paper. This model utilizes state variable based performance metrics, which account for the hierarchy among design activities. Also, to address the subjectivity that is inherent in this process and provide confidence interval estimates for the resulting agility measures, simulation modeling is used.