How agile manufacturing can improve your manufacturing productivity and quality

The concepts of agile manufacturing and/or the virtual corporation have been under discussion for some time and various authors have cited examples in the shipping, needle trades, and entertainment industries. The aerospace industries have begun to show the benefits of concurrent engineering and strategic planning for manufacturing. The authors have created a laboratory scale manufacturing environment to explore the benefits utilizing an advanced set of interactive multimedia tools in conjunction with video conferencing to discover the issues and benefits of applying these tools to the general manufacturing company. Preliminary results are encouraging but indicate that new tools and changes in management will be needed before agile manufacturing becomes common place. This presentation covers a variety of case studies and prototypical environments for recording and managing multi-point video conferences. Ubiquitous tasks such as: engineering change orders involving multiple vendors or staffs, creating and recording of the minutes of a multi-site meeting, and ordering a late night pizza are undertaken with these new tools and captured on video to illustrate the talk