Seeking structural flexibility
It has long been recognised that flexibility in operations and supply chain management is a desirable attribute. Generally flexibility in this context has usually been defined in terms of the ability to respond rapidly to demand changes in volume or mix for existing products. This capability might be defined as dynamic flexibility and it is linked to ideas such as set-up time reduction and the use of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS). However, in the world we have described earlier in this chapter, characterised by change which is discontinuous rather than incremental, a different type of flexibility is required.
In effect what is needed is something we might term structural flexibility. Structural flexibility ...
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