机械类专业英语教学课件作者韩林烨关雄飞Unit14课件.pptVIP

14.1 AM: A New Manufacturing Strategy 14.2 Reading material : The Factory of the Future Rapid, severe, and uncertain change is the most unsettling market reality that companies and people must cope with today. New products, even whole markets, appear, mutate and disappear within shorter and shorter periods of time. The pace of innovation continues to quicken, and the direction of innovation is often unpredictable. Product variety has proliferated to a bewildering degree. Agility is a comprehensive response to the challenges posed by a business environment dominated by change and uncertainty. Only those companies that respond to the deeper structural changes taking place in the commercial competition will be able to make sense of, and profit from, the superficially, chaotic changes occurring at the level of the market place. A more complete definition of agility, then, is that it is comprehensive response to the business challenges of profiting from rapidly changing and continually fragmenting global markets for high quality, high performance, customer configured goods and services. Agility is in the end, about making money in and from a turbulent, intensely competitive business environment. Agile challenges the prevailing mode of organization, management, production, and competitiveness. It is explicitly strategic rather than tactical, taking no established practices for granted. Agile competition demands that the process that supports the creation, production, and distribution of goods and services be centered on the customer-perceived value of products. This is very different from building a customer-centered company. Enhancing the satisfaction that a customer experiences in dealing with a company adds value and can improve focus and even efficiency. But customer-centered operations are fully consistent with the mass-production mode. Centering a company on product lines that enrich customers, products whose prices are determined by the value that customer