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  ABOUT AGILITY
What is agility? Agility is the ability of an organisation to manage change in a structured and timely manner. In a nutshell, the objective of agility or agile manufacturing is to ensure that companies are well-placed to thrive and prosper in a competitive marketplace. Companies can be said to be agile when they can produce a variety of products on a small scale, with no compromise to quality and at no extra cost, in the same way as if they were producing those same products en masse.
Becoming agile Our approach to implementing Agility differs from other improvement methodologies in that our framework recognises your uniqueness so that what you end up with is an agility strategy that is directly tailored to your business needs.
  As much as we would like to make you agile overnight, it simply doesn't happen that way. We view an agility strategy as "maturiting" through a three-stage process:
LEVEL ONE  BUILD ROBUSTNESS INTO THE COMPANY SYSTEM
  The primary objective in the first phase of "agility maturity" is to assist firms to become robust in those areas where they are the most vulnerable. For example, Company x runs nine machines, one of which is a production bottleneck. Preventing a potential bottleneck resource from failing makes sense. Hence, a company might consider a regular preventative maintenance programme, thereby reducing the vulnerability of its manufacturing operations. It is this initial “mapping” of vulnerabilities that provides the basis for developing robustness. Once vulnerabilities are identified these can be dealt with in a structured way.
LEVEL TWO  ENABLE RESPONSIVENESS
 

Having to deal with day-to-day production issues detracts from any ability to think and behave strategically. For example, Company x has decided to implement a programme of preventative maintenance on its bottleneck resource. However, the efficiency of the bottleneck machine is less than optimal due to the varied mix of parts the machine must deal with leading to downtime as a result of tooling changeovers. In this example, the use of SMED (single-minute exchange of dies) not only reduces machine downtime it also enables the company to be responsive to changes in its marketplace at short notice.

LEVEL THREE  BECOME FULLY PROACTIVE
 

In the final stage of agility maturity, the focus lies in anticipating and stimulating extra demand for your products in the marketplace. This is achieved by analysing growth strategies that are available to you from a marketing point-of-view. Following an initial evaluation, we translate growth strategies with the highest potential into tactical operating procedures that we use as a basis for our nine-step strategic sales growth package.
  You can learn about our Agility Implementation Framework in more depth here
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