Why Agility Is Crucial to Achieve Operational Excellence – Great post from Mark Davidson at LNS Research

Mark Davidson recently published an interesting articcle on LNS Reasearch Blog titled "Why Agility Is Crucial to Achieve Operational Excellence". The topic is one of my favourites since I consider agility probably the most important characteristic any company must have in the actual competitive marketplace.

Mark says: "As a manufacturer in an increasingly competitive marketplace, there’s a good chance you’re on an Operational Excellence journey of some kind. And while your specific objectives may vary depending on the industry in which you operate, your geographic footprint, or current strengths and weaknesses, chances are that achieving greater operational agility is one of your important Operational Excellence initiatives. Agility is critical in allowing you to come closer to being a more customer-driven organization—which should be an important goal for any manufacturing company."

I would add that agility is not only critical to become customer driven, but especially to remain customer driven. Customer needs or expectations change rapidly under the pressure of different forces, technological improvements, marketing, fashion trends. Any company need to be 100% focused in maintaining it's customers (that most of the times are much less loyal than in the past) adapting rapidly to their needs.

It's interesting how from the 2013-2014 LNS Research MOM Survey (completed by over 325 manufacturing executives and decision makers across a wide range of industries and geographies) the two top strategic manufacturing objective are: Ensuring consistent quality of products and Responsivness to customer order demands. Both of them are strictly related to serving customers better, while Increasing production capacity capabilities is just third.

Achieving those objectives requires improving both the effectiveness and the coordination of manufacturing processes which is the typical goal of all MES and MOM applications. That's the reason whiy we see an increased demand of Quality Management and Scheduling Managment functionalities in our MOM applications.