A survey of manufacturing flexibility: Implications for e-business flexibility
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paper_title: Entry, Exit, Growth, and Innovation over the Product Life Cycle

paper_content:

Regularities concerning how entry, exit, market structure, and innovation vary from the birth of technologically progressive industries through maturity are summarized. A model emphasizing differences in firm innovative capabilities and the importance of firm size in appropriating the returns from innovation is developed to explain the regularities. The model also explains regularities regarding the relationship within industries between firm size and firm innovative effort, innovative productivity, cost, and profitability. It predicts that over time firms devote more effort to process innovation but the number of firms and the rate and diversity of product innovation eventually wither. Copyright 1996 by American Economic Association.
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paper_title: A theoretical framework for analyzing the dimensions of manufacturing flexibility

paper_content:

Abstract The competitive environment of today has generated an increased interest in flexibility as a response mechanism. While the potential benefits of flexibility are familiar, the concept of flexibility itself is not well-understood. Neither practitioners nor academics agree upon, or know, how flexibility can be gauged or measured in its totality. Consequently, this study seeks to provide a framework for understanding this complex concept and to create a theoretical foundation for the development of generalizable measures for manufacturing flexibility. With this objective in mind, we first critically examine diverse streams of literature to define four constituent elements of flexibility: range-number (R-N), range-heterogeneity (R-H), mobility (M), and uniformity (U). The R-H element is new, and has not been proposed before in prior literature. These four elements can be applied to consistently define different types or dimensions of flexibility. Definitions for 10 flexibility dimensions pertaining to manufacturing are thus obtained. These definitions serve a dual purpose. First, they capture the domain of flexibility. Second, we show in this study how these definitions can be used to generate scale items, thereby facilitating the development of generalizable manufacturing flexibility measures. Several research avenues that can be explored once such measures are developed are also highlighted.
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paper_title: FLEXIBILITY AND THE THEORY OF THE FIRM

paper_content:

Abstract The object of this paper is (1) to bring together and integrate the various concepts of flexibility found in the economic literature, (2) to “flesh out” the meaning of various aspects of flexibility and their implications, thereby bridging the gap between the existing highly abstract theories and the empirical facts, and (3) in the process to give a rich and comprehensive enough description of an industry to stimulate further theoretical as well as empirical work. The study tries to combine inductive and deductive reasoning, using empirical observations based on indepth interviews with manufacturers in the metalworking industry in the United States and Sweden.
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paper_title: Toward a taxonomy of manufacturing flexibility dimensions

paper_content:

Abstract Researchers agree on the importance of manufacturing flexibility but are somewhat divided on the dimensions of this important construct. This paper seeks to find a middle-ground by working toward a generally acceptable taxonomy of manufacturing flexibility dimensions. The authors build on extant literature and propose a theoretically grounded operationalization of the manufacturing flexibility construct. Operational measures of manufacturing flexibility dimensions are identified and tested on a sample of 240 manufacturing firms. Results indicate good support for the theorized taxonomy.
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paper_title: Firm Survival and the Evolution of Oligopoly

paper_content:

After their commercial introduction, the number of producers of autos, tires, televisions, and penicillin initially grew and then experienced a sharp decline or shakeout. Guided by an evolutionary model of entry and exit, firm survival patterns in the four products are examined to determine whether there were common forces governing their distinctive evolution. Predictions concerning the effects of pre- and post-entry experience and the timing of entry on firm survival are tested. The findings are used to reflect on why industries experience shakeouts and evolve to be oligopolies.
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paper_title: Flexible manufacturing systems: a review of analytical models

paper_content:

This paper reviews recent work on the development of analytical models of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs). The contributions of each of the groups concerned with model development are summarized and an assessment is made of the strengths and weaknesses of its modelling approach. A number of directions in which models require extension are outlined, in particular the representation of such aspects of FMS operation as the tool delivery systems, the blocking phenomenon, the transient behavior and the differences between flexible machining systems and flexible assembly systems. Further work is also required on the structure of FMS control and the integration with plant production planning and control.
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paper_title: Flexibility of manufacturing systems: Concepts and measurements

paper_content:

Abstract The issue of flexibility is assuming increasing importance in manufacturing decision making. Flexibility is important to accommodate changes in the operating environment. Manufacturing systems that are flexible can utilize the flexibility as an adaptive response to unpredictable situations. Many researchers have defined various types of manufacturing flexibility and provided methods for measuring them. In this paper we have classified the literature based on the ways researchers have defined flexibility and the approaches used in measuring it.
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paper_title: Flexibility in Manufacturing: A Survey

paper_content:

This article is an attempt to survey the vast literature on flexibility in manufacturing that has accumulated over the last 10 to 20 years. The survey begins with a brief review of the classical literature on flexibility in economics and organization theory, which provides a background for manufacturing flexibility. Several kinds of flexibilities in manufacturing are then defined carefully along with their purposes, the means to obtain them, and some suggested measurements and valuations. Then we examine the interrelationships among the several flexibilities. Various empirical studies and analytical/optimization models dealing with these flexibilities are reported and discussed. The article concludes with suggestions for some possible future research directions.
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paper_title: The flexibility of production processes: a general framework

paper_content:

Various models have been developed over the years to analyze the many facets of the flexibility of production and operations systems. This paper proposes a general framework for the modeling and analysis of flexibility. The argument hinges upon the distinction between flexibility---a property of the technology---and diversity---a property of the environment in which the technology is operated. Flexibility is characterized as a hedge against diversity. Intuitive strategic properties that are conventionally attributed to flexibility are shown to follow directly from this framework. As illustrated by the different examples that are discussed, many existing models can be naturally interpreted in this context. As an application, the effect of load imbalance on a set of parallel machines is analyzed. The problem sheds light on the role of flexibility in queuing network and lot-sizing models of production.
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paper_title: Manufacturing flexibility: a strategic perspective

paper_content:

To help meet competitive realities operations managers need to know more about the strategic aspects of manufacturing flexibility. This paper takes steps toward meeting that need by critically reviewing the literature and establishing a research agenda for the area. A conceptual model, which places flexibility within a broad context, helps to identify certain assumptions of theoretical studies which need to be challenged. The model also provides a basis for identifying specific flexibility dimensions. The manner in which these dimensions may limit the effectiveness of a manufacturing process, and the problems in operationalizing them are discussed. Focusing next on the neglected area of applied work, concepts are presented for analyzing whether desired amounts of flexibility are being achieved and whether the potential for flexibility built into a manufacturing process is being tapped. Once more, a procedure is outlined for altering a plant's types and amounts of flexibility over time. The research agenda, which grows out of the appraisal of theoretical and applied work, indicates the value in studying generic flexibility strategies, the flexibility dimensions, methods of delivery, ways of evaluating and changing a process's flexibility, and above all measurement problems. The conclusions indicate principles for strategic research, some of which have relevance for the development of mathematical models.
---
paper_title: Flexibility of manufacturing systems: Concepts and measurements

paper_content:

Abstract The issue of flexibility is assuming increasing importance in manufacturing decision making. Flexibility is important to accommodate changes in the operating environment. Manufacturing systems that are flexible can utilize the flexibility as an adaptive response to unpredictable situations. Many researchers have defined various types of manufacturing flexibility and provided methods for measuring them. In this paper we have classified the literature based on the ways researchers have defined flexibility and the approaches used in measuring it.
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paper_title: Planning for flexibility

paper_content:

Abstract This paper presents an approach to corporate development which relates the instability of the firm's environment and the ability of the firm to change. Using this framework, managers can examine their firm's posture vis-a-vis their environment and choose an appropriate strategy. The framework explains why firms can find themselves at odds with their environments, and suggest the lines of action that firms should pursue to survive and grow.
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paper_title: Optimal investment in product-flexible manufacturing capacity

paper_content:

This paper presents a model and an analysis of the cost-flexibility tradeoffs involved in investing in product-flexible manufacturing capacity. Flexible capacity provides a firm with the ability to respond to a wide variety of future demand outcomes, but at the expense of the increased cost of acquiring flexible manufacturing capacity, as compared with dedicated or nonflexible capacity. We formulate the product-flexible manufacturing capacity investment decision as a two-stage stochastic program. In the first stage, the firm must make its investment decision in manufacturing capacity, before the resolution of uncertainty in product demand. In the second stage, after demand for products are known, the firm implements its production decisions, constrained by the first-stage investments. The main contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we develop a model of the firm's flexible manufacturing investment decision that conceptually captures some of the key characteristics of this complex decision problem. Second, with the aid of the model, we characterize the necessary and sufficient conditions for a firm to invest in flexible capacity to protect efficiently against uncertainty in demand for all of its products. Third, we explore the sensitivity of the firm's optimal capacity investment decision to key problem components, namely to the cost of flexible and nonflexible production capacity, to the underlying distribution of product demand, and to the level of risk.
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paper_title: The Management of Manufacturing Flexibility

paper_content:

Defines flexibility as the ability to change or react with little penalty in time, effort, cost or performance, and surveys the literature on manufacturing flexibility. Presents a framework for its analysis, which provides a common language about the various categories of flexibility the company needs to manage; allows the company to rank them in order of importance, or of the degree of management attention they will need; and enables managers to formulate clear implementation plans for maintaining, measuring and improving them. It also allows managers to determine and distinguish what is required of manufacturing operations, and provides a common base of understanding, so that all involved know what is to be improved. Presents two case examples illustrating the application of the framework to define the type of flexibility - in terms of its dimensions, time horizons and elements - of concern to each of the companies involved.
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paper_title: Flexibility as Process Mobility: The Management of Plant Capabilities for Quick Response Manufacturing

paper_content:

This paper examines the relationship between one form of manufacturing flexibility - operational mobility (or the ability to change quickly between products) - and structure, infrastructure and managerial policy at the plant level. Using data from a broader study aimed at exploring the general sources of manufacturing flexibility, the paper provides evidence of the strength of the links between manufacturing flexibility and such factors as scale, technology vintage, computer integration and workforce management. There has been little empirical work on this subject, partly as a result of the difficulties of defining and measuring flexibility. The type of flexibility explored in this paper is specifically the capability of a plant to change between process states quickly. I find that most of the variance in flexibility across plants can be explained by a combination of structural factors, such as the scale of the plant; infrastructural factors, such as the length of service of the operators; and measures of managerial emphasis, such as the perceived importance of making quick changeovers. Of these factors, I find that the scale of a plant does not strongly inhibit its flexibility and that computer integration is either insignificant or detrimental to the flexibility of a plant. Workforce characteristics are also important determinants of flexibility, and the results suggest that less experienced operators may be more flexible in their ability to make certain types of change quickly between products. A strong determinant of the flexibility of a plant is the extent to which operators perceive managers to have emphasized the importance of various performance dimensions. Finally, I show that different forms of flexibility are not necessarily related to each other. This emphasizes the importance of identifying precisely the particular type of flexibility that is to be developed when building manufacturing capabilities.
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paper_title: The Calculus of Reengineering

paper_content:

Advances in new Information Technologies IT and changes in the business environment such as globalization and competitive pressure have prompted organizations to embark on reengineering projects involving significant investments in IT and business process redesign. However, the evidence of payoff from such investments can be classified as mixed as best, a problem we partly attribute to the absence of a strong theoretical foundation to assess and analyze reengineering projects. We seek to apply complementarity theory and a business value modeling approach to address some questions involving what, when, and how much to reengineer. Complementarity theory is based on the notion that the value of having more of one factor increases by having more of another complementary factor. Further, related developments in the optimization of “supermodular” functions provide a useful way to maximize net benefits by exploiting complementary relationships between variables of interest. Combining this theory with a multi-level business value model showing relationships between key performance measures and their drivers, we argue that organizational payoff is maximized when several factors relating to IT, decision authority, business processes and incentives are changed in a coordinated manner in the right directions by the right magnitude to move toward an ideal design configuration. Our analysis further shows that when a complementary reengineering variable is left unchanged either due to myopic vision or self-interest, the organization will not be able to obtain the full benefits of reengineering due to smaller optimal changes in the other variables. We also show that by increasing the cost of changing the levels of design variables, unfavorable pre-existing conditions e.g., too much heterogeneity in the computing environment can lead to reengineering changes of smaller magnitude than in a setting with favorable conditions.
---
paper_title: Manufacturing flexibility: a strategic perspective

paper_content:

To help meet competitive realities operations managers need to know more about the strategic aspects of manufacturing flexibility. This paper takes steps toward meeting that need by critically reviewing the literature and establishing a research agenda for the area. A conceptual model, which places flexibility within a broad context, helps to identify certain assumptions of theoretical studies which need to be challenged. The model also provides a basis for identifying specific flexibility dimensions. The manner in which these dimensions may limit the effectiveness of a manufacturing process, and the problems in operationalizing them are discussed. Focusing next on the neglected area of applied work, concepts are presented for analyzing whether desired amounts of flexibility are being achieved and whether the potential for flexibility built into a manufacturing process is being tapped. Once more, a procedure is outlined for altering a plant's types and amounts of flexibility over time. The research agenda, which grows out of the appraisal of theoretical and applied work, indicates the value in studying generic flexibility strategies, the flexibility dimensions, methods of delivery, ways of evaluating and changing a process's flexibility, and above all measurement problems. The conclusions indicate principles for strategic research, some of which have relevance for the development of mathematical models.
---
paper_title: A theoretical framework for analyzing the dimensions of manufacturing flexibility

paper_content:

Abstract The competitive environment of today has generated an increased interest in flexibility as a response mechanism. While the potential benefits of flexibility are familiar, the concept of flexibility itself is not well-understood. Neither practitioners nor academics agree upon, or know, how flexibility can be gauged or measured in its totality. Consequently, this study seeks to provide a framework for understanding this complex concept and to create a theoretical foundation for the development of generalizable measures for manufacturing flexibility. With this objective in mind, we first critically examine diverse streams of literature to define four constituent elements of flexibility: range-number (R-N), range-heterogeneity (R-H), mobility (M), and uniformity (U). The R-H element is new, and has not been proposed before in prior literature. These four elements can be applied to consistently define different types or dimensions of flexibility. Definitions for 10 flexibility dimensions pertaining to manufacturing are thus obtained. These definitions serve a dual purpose. First, they capture the domain of flexibility. Second, we show in this study how these definitions can be used to generate scale items, thereby facilitating the development of generalizable manufacturing flexibility measures. Several research avenues that can be explored once such measures are developed are also highlighted.
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paper_title: Flow Shop Scheduling with Resource Flexibility

paper_content:

This paper explores the improvements in manufacturing efficiency that can be achieved by broadening the scope of production scheduling to include both the sequencing of work and the coordination of the resource inputs required to perform work. Recognizing that some resources are inherently flexible and thus can be reassigned dynamically to processing centers as needed, and that job processing times are often a function of the amount of resource dedicated to specific operations, we formulate the flexible-resource scheduling problem with the objective of simultaneously determining the permutation job sequence, resource allocation policy, and operation start times that optimize system performance. Focusing on flexible-resource scheduling in flow shop production systems, we discuss problem complexity, identify properties of and establish lower bounds for optimal schedules, develop optimal and heuristic solution approaches, and report the results of extensive computational experimentation designed to explore t...
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paper_title: Scheduling Parallel Manufacturing Cells with Resource Flexibility

paper_content:

This paper investigates the improvements in manufacturing performance that can be realized by broadening the scope of the production scheduling function to include both job sequencing and processing-time control through the deployment of a flexible resource. We consider an environment in which a set of jobs must be scheduled over a set of parallel manufacturing cells, each consisting of a single machine, where the processing time of each job depends on the amount of resource allocated to the associated cell. Two versions of the problem are introduced: a static problem in which a single resource-allocation decision is made and maintained throughout the production horizon, and a dynamic problem in which resource can be reassigned among the production cells as local bottlenecks shift. We provide mathematical formulations for each version of the problem, establish problem complexity, identify important characteristics of optimal solutions, develop optimal and heuristic solution approaches, and report the results of a set of computational experiments. The computational results demonstrate that substantial improvements in operational performance can be achieved through effective utilization of resource flexibility.
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paper_title: A Production Line That Balances Itself

paper_content:

In "bucket brigade" manufacturing, such as recently introduced to the apparel industry, a production line has n workers moving among m stations, where each worker independently follows a simple rule that determines what to do next. Our analysis suggests and experiments confirm that if the workers are sequenced from slowest to fastest then, independently of the stations at which they begin, a stable partition of work will spontaneously emerge. Furthermore, the production rate will converge to a value that, for typical production lines, is the maximum possible among all ways of organizing the workers and stations.
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paper_title: Flexibility in Manufacturing: A Survey

paper_content:

This article is an attempt to survey the vast literature on flexibility in manufacturing that has accumulated over the last 10 to 20 years. The survey begins with a brief review of the classical literature on flexibility in economics and organization theory, which provides a background for manufacturing flexibility. Several kinds of flexibilities in manufacturing are then defined carefully along with their purposes, the means to obtain them, and some suggested measurements and valuations. Then we examine the interrelationships among the several flexibilities. Various empirical studies and analytical/optimization models dealing with these flexibilities are reported and discussed. The article concludes with suggestions for some possible future research directions.
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Title: A survey of manufacturing flexibility: Implications for e-business flexibility

Section 1: Concepts and perspectives
Description 1: Discusses various views on flexibility from the literature and attempts to develop a well-rounded perspective on flexibility for e-business decision-makers.

Section 2: Business decisions concerning flexibility are made
Description 2: Explores the three distinct levels—strategic, tactical, and operational—at which business decisions concerning flexibility are made, and how these levels affect e-business flexibility.

Section 3: Review of research on manufacturing flexibility
Description 3: Summarizes key concepts from the extensive literature on manufacturing flexibility, focusing on its strategic, tactical, and operational aspects, and discusses how these apply to e-business.

Section 4: Application of research to e-business flexibility
Description 4: Characterizes what e-business flexibility might mean for an organization by drawing analogies from manufacturing flexibility and explaining how these principles can be applied to e-business settings.

Section 5: Strategic aspects of flexibility
Description 5: Highlights the concepts and issues that should be considered in strategic flexibility decisions, including investment decisions and the benefits of flexibility in an e-business context.

Section 6: Tactical aspects of flexibility
Description 6: Discusses how flexibility is created and allocated within the system, including where flexibility should be added, how it should be measured, and potential returns on investments in flexibility.

Section 7: Operational aspects of flexibility
Description 7: Explores how flexibility in business operations can be utilized in daily business functions, focusing on workforce allocation policies and other operational strategies to leverage flexibility for maximum benefits.

Section 8: Conclusions
Description 8: Provides a synthesis of knowledge on flexibility and its implications for e-business practitioners and researchers, emphasizing the need for further study and the practical application of flexibility principles in e-business environments.