Towards Theory Building in Agile Manufacturing Strategy—A Taxonomical Approach

Agility has been widely accepted in manufacturing industry as a new competitive concept. However, how to develop a manufacturing strategy based around agility is not fully understood. This paper proposes a framework for the implementation of agility as a manufacturing strategy and describes the development and analysis of a numerical taxonomy of agility strategies using the framework. The taxonomy was developed with cluster analysis based on the relative importance attached to seven agility capabilities by a number of U.K. manufacturing companies. Three distinct clusters of strategy groups were observed across the industry studied: Quick, Responsive and Proactive Players. Quick Players are oriented towards a strong customer focus and quickness. They do not emphasize flexibility and responsiveness to changes and they give low priority to proactiveness and partnership. Responsive Players are preoccupied with flexibility and responsiveness to changes. They do not emphasize proactiveness and partnerships and they attach low importance to quickness. Proactive Players are characterized by high priorities on proactiveness and customer focus, high values attached to all capabilities, and high importance given to partnerships. The underlying dimensions of agile capabilities along which the three strategy groups differ were investigated based on factor analysis and canonical discriminant analysis. Changes/uncertainties in the business environment experienced by members of different strategic groups were compared, and "manufacturing strategy choices," in terms of manufacturing practices for achieving agility, employed by members of different strategic groups were studied. Business characteristics and typical cases for each strategy group were investigated