An Investigation of the Factors affecting Flexible Manufacturing Competence of Organizations

Abstract

Owing to the fluctuating demands of customers and intensified competition, organizations are searching ways to enhance their flexible manufacturing competence (FMC) as it has been recognized as one of the most important approaches to handle the aforementioned situations. The existing literature provides several factors that significantly affect FMC, however, the interrelationships among these factors are somewhat unexplored. The insights to the interactions among these factors could provide crucial managerial implications that could pave ways for success of organizations in today’s uncertain business environment. To this end, the present work makes an effort and highlights the important factors and investigates their interactions with each other for the enhancement of FMC of organizations. In this paper, the interpretive structural modelling (ISM) methodology has been implemented to explore the interactions and develop a structural model depicting the hierarchy of the factors. Further, MICMAC analysis has been used to categorize the factors into different groups based on their driving and dependence powers.