The Twenty‐first Century Enterprise, Agile Manufacturing and Something Called CALS

Abstract

Success in the twenty‐first century will require many manufacturing enterprises to have the innovative flexibility to respond rapidly to market desires, to produce top quality products, to deliver almost instantaneously, and to provide superb service. Built on lean manufacturing, the agile manufacturing paradigm is an evolutionary step, partially based on a combination of flexible manufacturing, integrated product development and stratgic partnering. An agile manufactuing enterprice is a dynamically reconfigurable organization of independent companies which forms individual companies optimized for the specifics of each market opportunity. Key to the success of such a paradigm is the ability (for often geographically dispersed functions) to share fully the technical information required and used for product design, development, validation, production and service. Argues that CALS, a standardized approach to integrated product data management, has the strategies, approaches, technologies and neutral data formats as well as the growing international commitment to enable this data sharing.

Citation

Ross, E.M. (1994), "The Twenty‐first Century Enterprise, Agile Manufacturing and Something Called CALS", World Class Design to Manufacture, Vol. 1 No. 3, pp. 5-10. https://doi.org/10.1108/09642369210056593