Agile In Manufacturing Industry

Indian Manufacturing industry is governed by increasing financial complexities, relentless customer requirements and demand cyclicality. Hence to be successful in the market, many industrial manufacturers are transitioning to Agile to effectively plan and execute complex programs, reduce wastage, deliver products which meet the customers’ requirements and to position themselves as the complete solution providers to their consumers.

Focus in this industry has drastically shifted towards customers. Customers are getting more and more demanding with their unique needs and they have also become more knowledgeable. This has forced the manufacturers to improve product line planning, maintain better balance between resources and features and to innovate rapidly. They have realised that to stay competitive, they must provide superior customer service continuously throughout the life cycle of the product. Also, they have to effectively manage and communicate product information with suppliers to drive the product costs down, delivered at specified quality levels and meet schedule commitments.

Agile tools can help these companies in the following ways:

1.    Bids and Proposals: A traceability matrix can be maintained which can link each and every bid and proposals with the clients’ specific requirements, to downstream design, planning, procurement, production, maintenance schemes etc.

2.    Product Portfolio Planning and Maintenance: All the various products can be tracked simultaneously, with dashboards providing vital information like resource utilization, number of features completed, cost incurred, due delivery date, constraints etc. for every project, thereby allowing a lot of flexibility in resource management and task allocation.

3.    Supplier Management: There can be synchronization between the design and the sourcing teams so that the outsourced components meet the quality and performance criteria.

4.    Prototyping: Coordination between distributed design and manufacturing partners to communicate effectively and timely among them, so that the prototype developed covers most of the features or sub features of the original product and it also ensures that the prototype is scalable and flexible in nature. Similarly, in case a new trend is being tested as a pilot project, agile tools will help in frequent customer interaction and collaboration, which will lead to identification and tracking of defects/error of planning design etc. All these will be properly tracked due to which changes can be easily identified.

5.    Post sales service and support: Tracking and managing performance of products once delivered, maintaining logs of any defects which the customer identifies, and coordinating among various stake holders helps immensely in satisfactory post sales service and support.

Thus, Agile is slowly being used by many manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency, and it can be assumed that this is only the tip of the iceberg.