Assessing Agility Implementation in Manufacturing.

Agility in manufacturing can be briefly defined as the ability to foresee, attend, and recover from an unexpected change. Tightly related to leanness and flexibility, its implementation requires different actions on each of the management, technology, and operations levels. This paper presents a 26-item measurement tool that assesses and detects the lack of Agility on those three levels. Data was collected through online interviews with managers from 140 large size US manufacturing companies. The constructs had high reliability coefficients and confirmatory factor analysis showed excellent fit indices yielding promising results. Future work might involve validating this model in a larger sample and checking whether it applies in different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]