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Dynamic business environment has a deep influence on production and management related exercises. In order to remain competitive, organization needs to coordinate with continuous and unpredictable changes taking place in the market. Globalization of markets is posing competitive pressure on firms, which leads them to adopt a new manufacturing paradigm termed agile manufacturing (AM). The purpose of the present case study is to explore the contribution of AM towards agility and productivity enhancements in an Indian manufacturing company.

The study is carried out at forging industry which has been assessed on certain key business performance indicators. The assessment highlighted various issues which had scope for improvement to enhance the agility of the organization. Therefore, a phase-wise implementation of AM is carried to reap the significant benefits as a result of AM implementation in the case study company. The methodology has been applied to decrease the inline rejection, increase the productivity and responsiveness of the organization.

The results revealed an improvement in performance score from 77.5 to 100. Further, an increase in productivity and reduction in line rejection has been achieved through the systematic implementation of AM.

The study highlights the contributions of strategic AM implementation to organizational performance and highlights the need for successful management of AM practices for establishing sustained performance of the organization.

The contribution of the present work is the phase-wise implementation of AM in the case studied company.

In the past, the insufficiency of the traditional business practices to meet vibrant customer demands in continuously changing business environment has severely affected organizational competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to develop and propose a new framework for smoother and effective implementation of agile manufacturing by identifying and integrating a set of significant agility principles and techniques.

The present work proposed a framework for agile manufacturing by deploying the comparative analysis of 17 frameworks published in peer-reviewed journals.

The proposed conceptual framework constitutes of eight pillars for agile manufacturing implementation. The proposed framework relies on a strong foundation of leadership support. The roof of the proposed framework of agile manufacturing is supported by the pillars constituted of seven elements, an industry must deploy for successfully implementing agile manufacturing, namely, human resource-related issues, organizational culture-related issues, supplier-related issues, customer-related issues, innovation, concurrent engineering and information technology.

This work is the first attempt, in the best knowledge of the authors, to employ comparative analysis for critically analyzing a wide range of agile manufacturing frameworks. The findings of this study will assist researchers and managers in agile manufacturing implementation in more a smoother and effective way in manufacturing industries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of agile manufacturing practices on business performance of Indian medium and large-scale manufacturing industry.

A survey questionnaire was designed to attain the research objectives. Agile manufacturing questionnaire was sent to around 500 randomly selected manufacturing organizations in the northern spectrum of India through e-mails and posts, out of which 154 usable responses have been received. This study investigates the inter-relationships between various agile manufacturing implementation practices and business performance measures using various statistical techniques. This paper deploys Games–Howell hoc test to establish the statistical significance of business performance improvements, progressively accrued over a reasonable period of time, through holistic agile manufacturing implementation.

The paper validates the contribution of agile manufacturing toward realization of the significant improvements in various business performance measures such as customer-related achievements, financial achievements, business-related achievements, operational achievements, employee-related achievements, and supplier-related achievements. Further, the discriminant validity test has been used in this paper for classifying highly successful and moderately successful organizations.

The paper only concentrated on manufacturing organizations in northern India. The results of this paper cannot generalize across all the sectors and spectrum of Indian manufacturing organizations.

This paper develops an insight into the strong potential of agile manufacturing implementation practices in affecting business performance measures.

The study aims at empirically investigating and prioritizing the critical barriers for the successful implementation of agile manufacturing in the medium- and large-scale Indian manufacturing industries.

A literature review of peer-reviewed journals and discussion with experts is used to identify 17 barriers to the implementation of agile manufacturing. An empirical survey is then conducted to collect data regarding the agile manufacturing barriers and is further analyzed using the factor analysis and vlsekriterijumska optimizacija i kompromisno resenje (VIKOR).

Based on the survey of empirical data, the investigated critical barriers were reduced in five critical categories, as follows: Managerial constraints, technological constraints, human resource–related constraints, operational constraints and organizational culture-related constraints, which are further ranked in terms of their severity using VIKOR. This research advocates the development of a strategy for addressing the most critical barriers instead of focusing on all for the successful implementation of agile manufacturing.

This work contributes to agile manufacturing literature by the structured presentation of the barriers to implement agile manufacturing in the Indian manufacturing industry. It also extends the integrated factor analysis and VIKOR method to investigate and rank the barriers.

Agility addresses vibrant solutions for running companies to meet the dares of customers asking for high quality and low- cost goods and services. The purpose of this study is to identify the practices for the successful implementation of agile manufacturing and measure their relationship with business performance measures of the manufacturing industry.

The data for the pilot study were collected from 26 respondents through a questionnaire survey. After confirming the normality and reliability of the data, it was analyzed to examine the relationship between agile manufacturing practices and business performance measures.

The results show that there are strong relationships between agile manufacturing practices and business performance. Further, these attributes significantly contribute to delivering better business performance.

The study signifies the need for agile manufacturing in enhancing business performance for the growth and sustainability of the organization.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the existing literature on agile manufacturing (AM) to pinpoint critical success factors (CSFs) affecting the successful implementation of agile manufacturing systems.

The study focused on empirical articles published in peer-reviewed journals from 1991 to 2019 (July). In total, 37 empirical studies were shortlisted for analysis as the reliability and validity of the constructs were critically tested using various statistical methods. Further, “Pareto analysis” tool was employed to sort and arrange the factors critical for smoother and effective implementation of AM, in descending order according to their frequency of occurrence.

The present work scrutinizes 37 research papers, resulting in 33 CSFs that affect AM implementation. Using Pareto analysis, 8 CSFs are regarded as “vital few,” which account for 82.66 percent of occurrence, and the remaining 25 CSFs are regarded as “useful many,” which account for 17.34 percent of occurrence. The managers must focus on successful deployment of “vital few” CSFs, as they are more critical in achieving business excellence through the successful implementation of AM, in comparison to other 25 “useful many” CSFs.

To the best knowledge of authors, this work is the first attempt to employ Pareto analysis for critically analyzing a wide range of AM CSFs studies. The findings of this study will assist researchers and managers in AM implementation in a more smoother and effective way in manufacturing industries.

The concept of agile manufacturing is becoming critically important to manufacturing industry due to rapid industrialization, fluctuating customer demand, and turbulent business environment. The aim of this study is to prioritize the attributes for successful implementation of agile manufacturing using a combined analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) approach in Indian manufacturing industry.

The current study identifies eight agile manufacturing attributes through literature review and discussion with subject experts. The experts from different manufacturing industry have been asked to provide data for pairwise comparison of attributes. Afterward, an integrated AHP and TOPSIS approach is employed. The AHP is used to drive the priority weights of the attributes, and TOPSIS is used for prioritizing the attributes for successful implementation of agile manufacturing.

“Information technology,” “human resource management-related issues,” “customer-related issues,” “leadership support,” and “organizationalc related-issues” have been ranked as the top five significant and contributing attributes, which can pave the path for top management to concentrate on the critical areas and allocate significant resources to ensure successful implementation of agile manufacturing.

This research integrates AHP and TOPSIS to prioritize the attributes for successful implementation of agile manufacturing, which are further validated by comparing the ranks obtained through respective approach and sensitivity analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contribution of agile manufacturing (AM) initiatives in the Indian manufacturing industry and their influence on the business performance enhancement.

A survey questionnaire was designed to attain the research objectives. The variables included in the questionnaire were adapted from the elaborated literature review and validated through discussion held with practitioners, academicians and the industry experts. AM questionnaire was sent to approximately 500 randomly selected manufacturing organizations in the northern spectrum of India through e-mails and posts, out of which 154 usable responses were received.

The study identified that the Indian manufacturing industry has been reasonably successful in improving the business performance by implementing AM initiatives and has successfully reaped the benefits of AM implementation.

The present work develops an insight into the prevailing AM practices adopted by Indian manufacturing organizations. The study calculated the percent point score for each issue of AM initiative with respect to the Indian manufacturing industry and highlighted its impact on the enhancement of business performance.

A large number of small-scale industries have shown their existence in India, tough competition among them made the survival of small industries difficult. All facing problems like reduced production and poor quality. The case study presented in the paper deals with Kaizen implementation in a machine vice manufacturer company. Kaizen has tremendous impacts on the production techniques and lead times. Case study represented is to motivate practitioners for implementing Kaizen in small-scale industries of India. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The methodology applied to implement the Kaizen in Indian small-scale industry. Fishbone diagrams have been used to represent cause and effects. The result has been shown as savings in terms of money and time.

Processing time has been reduced by 44.4 percent and an amount of Rs. 64,000 has been saved by recovering a total of 80 square feet working area. Improvements in the form of work flow have been achieved.

Value stream mapping can be integrated with Kaizen for more reduction in the product lead time.

The paper will be worthily for practitioners and consultants for understanding Kaizen implementation in small-scale industry of India.

The paper yields lots of values for practitioners to understand the impacts and significance of the Kaizen in small-scale industries of India. Also it bridges the gap between theory and practical of Kaizen implementation in small-scale industry of India.

The purpose of this paper is to use the 5S tool to assist a small-scale manufacturing organization to become more productive and more efficient.

A simple approach has been adopted to create the teams for implementing 5S. Cause-and-effect diagram has been studied for shop floor analysis. Later, four data collection methods have been used to ensure right implementation of the 5S.

In the frames of this case study, it has been analyzed that implementation of “5S” resulted in overall improvement of the organization. With the implementation of “5S”, major benefits in the form of tool searching time have been achieved. Tool searching time from shop floor has been reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes. “5S” audit has been conducted in the organization. “5S” audit score has been increased from 7 (Week 1) to 55 (Week 20).

5S is a powerful tool and can be implemented in various industries whether micro, small, medium or large. Implementation of 5S has large horizontal development and can be implemented in all the workstations of an organization.

The publications and case study presented in this paper will be useful to researchers, professionals and others concerned with this subject to understand the significance of 5S.