The too-flexible factory

Manufacturers are under many pressures to change the way they do things. There are the pressures to reduce product development times, to provide customised products within a volume manufacturing environment, to make frequent deliveries and hold low levels of stock. All these are laudable aims, but achieving them in an orderly manner is not easy. What can happen, sometimes, is that the desire to achieve these goals outstrips the infrastructure and training of the people who run the factory or facility. Then the factory may find itself in the state of trying to meet customers requests while struggling to control and predict its own performance. Such a state of affairs we call the too-flexible factory. The authors explore the possibility that your factory may be too flexible for its own good