Flexibility as a Manufacturing Objective

The concept of the flexibility of manufacturing systems is topical and important for three reasons. First, the instability and unpredictability of the environment, in which manufacturing companies operate, has forced many companies to reorganise their production, if only to reduce the overall scale of their operations. Second, developments such as flexible manufacturing systems and robotics, mean that flexibility is being explicitly promoted as a desirable attribute of production equipment. Third, the relatively recent interest in the nature of production management objectives has widened the scope of production aims beyond cost and productivity issues, to include the flexibility of production systems.