An analysis of reconfigurability in different business production strategies

Abstract Reconfigurability is the ability to rearrange manufacturing systems’ components to deal with product variety and fluctuations in demand. It has various core characteristics that can be designed in many different ways to provide to the manufacturing systems the appropriated abilities to cope with these changes. This paper is intended to conduct an exploratory analysis of the implementation of reconfigurability in companies using different business production strategies, namely make-to-order, engineer-to-order, assembly-to-order and make-to-stock. To achieve this objective, an aggregated measure of reconfigurability is used. This measure can be useful to understand the needs of reconfigurability in manufacturing companies using different production strategies. This study uses a questionnaire-based methodology. The findings suggest that the levels of implementation of reconfigurability are different among companies adopting different production strategies This occurs because different production strategies are associated to different levels of variations in product mix and, consequently, different needs of reconfigurability. This paper also presents some guidelines to improve the levels of reconfigurability implemented, considering the particularities of each production strategy analysed.