Date of Award

Fall 2008

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Program/Concentration

Mechanical Engineering

Committee Director

Alok K. Verma

Committee Director

Han P. Bao

Committee Member

Ronald Jerasa

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E56 E73 2008

Abstract

This research focuses on the development of Comprehensive Agility Measurement Tool. Industry independent use of such a tool would help enterprises benchmark their success in achieving agility.

Continuous improvement and modernization of manufacturing techniques around the globe have brought many mutations in manufacturing industry. Customer expectations and demands are behind the introduction of new paradigms such as mass production, lean, mass customization, agile and now internet-based manufacturing. Though lean was first coined with respect to manufacturing industry, soon it became applicable in all the industries based on its waste reduction and productivity improvement techniques. Lacking international competitiveness of US manufacturing industry in the 1990s led to the detailed study of East-Asian competitors' manufacturing techniques. This gave birth to "Agility" and "Agile Manufacturing" which soon became the buzzwords in all the industries. Companies try hard to respond to external challenges on time; in short companies try to be agile. This generated need to measure agility of an enterprise so that an enterprise can self assess its progress and make improvements required becoming agile or maintaining agility. Agility measure can prove a benchmark for such an effort. Because of its complex nature, agility is very hard to measure on a fixed scale. There have been some efforts to measure agility of manufacturing industry. This became the main motivation behind this research to come up with an agility measurement tool that can be customized and used by any enterprise in any industry. The final product of this research is "Comprehensive Agility Measurement Tool" (CAMT).

CAMT is divided into two parts. It considers 14 agility cnablers, including human resource to build a measure of agility. Firstly it measures overall agility of an enterprise on the scale of one to five; one being least agile and five being highly agile. Overall agility of an enterprise is measured in terms of Comprehensive Agility Index (CAI). CAI is used to benchmark company's overall agile status. Individual scores of agility enablers are used to identify the potential areas for improvement. Second part of CAMT is Aggregated Agility Metric (AAM). This metric is used to evaluate responsiveness of an enterprise in case of trade-off situations. This metric is also used to simulate the effect of available resources on improvement in agility. This helps the management in better utilization of resources to achieve maximum agility.

CAMT is designed to be used in any industry. Customization feature of CAMT gives top management flexibility to customize it. Case studies of automobile, shipbuilding — repair, and software companies represent strong examples of customization and use of CAMT in any type of industry.

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In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/6a7q-8w22

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