An Agility Reference Model for the Manufacturing Enterprise: The Example of the Furniture Industry

There is an extensive amount of research literature about the concept of agility, describing its drivers and capabilities, and even suggesting methodologies to develop agility. However, most of these efforts remain vague with respect to the characteristics and the expected contributions of the technologies involved or required. This paper proposes an agility reference model; a unifying conceptual representation of agility in terms of the necessary capabilities needed by every process involved in the enterprise seeking for agility. Agility is described using three capabilities which are believed to be the sources of competitive advantages; flexibility, responsiveness, and autonomy. It is shown that each capability addresses some specific issues and can only be thoroughly developed if the technologies used are characterized with some specific attributes or properties. The idea behind the proposed agility reference model was to derive a typology framework that emphasizes the taxonomy of the market interaction strategies for furniture products, and the competitive priorities that should be targeted by furniture enterprises aiming to be agile. Accordingly, the issues related to the different agility capabilities were discussed in the context of the furniture enterprise of the future. Then, the suitability of the proposed model for the derivation of the typology was explored based on case studies on two furniture manufacturing enterprises. The case studies analyze the context in terms of competitive priorities and customization strategies and investigate the agility properties of the technologies in use.