Multipath agility in electronics manufacturing

Agile manufacturing provides a framework for the improvement of manufacturing productivity and quality through the integration of organizations, technologies, and information resources. The Electronics Agile Manufacturing Research Institute (EAMRI) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is developing new methodologies for agile manufacturing in the electronics industry, and conducting demonstration projects and assessments of the effectiveness of these new approaches. The goal of the EAMRI is the development and integration of information infrastructure to facilitate distributed design, planning, manufacturing, and marketing functions. A goal of this work is to achieve multipath agility in the product development process. Multipath agility provides increased access to alternative resources and information, and achieves improvements in productivity and quality through flexibility of access and utilization of resources, rather than through stepwise improvements in any one task