Journey towards agility: the agile wheel explored

Abstract

Competitive advantage increasingly rests upon a dynamic capability to compete successfully in an environment of frequent, challenging and, often, unpredictable change. Sustaining competitive advantage through price alone is no longer a viable strategy for most firms. Firms need to succeed in markets where a range of non-price advantages are expected by customers. Order-winning criteria include rate of innovation, fitness for purpose, volume flexibility, variety, extreme customisation and, above all, rapid responsiveness. Increasing global and local competition mean that companies unable to respond to these customer demands are unlikely to survive. Deployment of the principles and practices of agile enterprise appears to offer a solution. This paper, based upon preliminary findings of the Agile Manufacturing Research Group (AMRG), discusses these issues and, through the introduction of the agile wheel reference model (AWRM), identifies the specific policies and practices that support agility.

The Role of Emotional Intelligence on Workforce Agility in the Workplace

“…Agile workforce is the most part of an organization in achieving the agile organization and inattention to this factor causes the weakness of organization agility. Cooperation, allegiance and capability of individuals are the base of an organization and use of skills, knowledge, acuteness, experience and intelligence of them for having the organizational capacity are key and important challenges in achieving organizational agility (Meredith and Francis, 2000).…”

“…In Goldman and his partner's opinion, ability of organization in responding to changes is possible when organization's physical and human resources are organized suitably and individuals motivation and creativity are noticed. Meredith and Francis (2000) divide agility providers into four categories including process, guideline, communications and human resources. In their point of view these four dimensions are connected to each other, all of them would be necessary to reach agility, and if one of them is neglected, organization agility will be weakened.…”

Manoeuvring physical assets into the future

“…Yusuf et al (1999) were among the first authors to address this question by mentioning four concepts of agility: 1. virtual enterprise; 2. core competence management; 3. knowledge-driven enterprise; and 4. capability for reconfiguration. Since then, a large number of publications have discussed the characteristics of agile (manufacturing) companies (Yusuf et al, 1999;Meredith and Francis, 2000;Sharifi and Zhang, 2001;Brown and Bessant, 2003;van Oosterhout et al, 2005;Vázquez-Bustelo et al, 2007;Bottani, 2010). These characteristics ranged from teambuilding, human resources management, concurrent engineering, partnerships and information communication technologies.…”

“…Some authors refer to agile technologies (e.g. Vázquez-Bustelo et al, 2007;Bottani, 2010) or flexible assets and systems (Meredith and Francis, 2000). However, they focus on the manufacturing practices rather than on how assets are agile (see Aravind Raj et al, (2013)).…”

“…Bottoni's (2010) flexible production technology is the only one to include agile assets. Meredith and Francis (2000) are a notable exception in their use of flexible assets and systems to describe one of the four characteristics of agile processes. To remedy this deficiency, this article investigates agility ranging from the following three sources: 1. the physical asset; 2. the deployment of the asset; and 3. the organization (see Table 9.2.1).…”