An Approach to Characterize Manufacturing Flexibility

Flexibility is a key requirement for manufacturing companies to cope with the ever increasing turbulent environment. Though the ongoing discussion on flexibility has contributed much to the conceptual understanding of the nature of flexibility, it is still far from being characterized. We propose a systematic two-step approach to characterize flexibility. In the first step, conceptual frameworks are proposed to decouple flexibility from changes in the operating environment and from the performance criteria. This facilitates treating flexibility as an absolute concept. In the second step, the intrinsic properties of production system are extracted in the form of four flexibility descriptors namely: capacity range, capacity response, capability range, and capability response, to enable flexibility characterization. The focus is on volume and mix flexibility, as we believe these flexibility types are the most important ones from the operational perspective. The usage of the proposed descriptors is elaborated for the workstation level.