It is my proposal in this paper to affirm that
from all the competitive components mentioned above, the one of
flexibility is the one that has had the least attention in our
past industrial history. It seems we would pretend to preserve
Ford's model. If we look to the industrial plants in the Western
hemisphere, we will observe that most of them are still applying
the model from the days of yore—massive, standard, and stable
production— when the market is demanding plants that can work in
even smaller lots, under specific customer products and dates, and
inserted in an unpredictable market. In "Brace for Japan's
Hot New Strategy" (Fortune, September 1992), Thomas
A. Steward had the courage to point in this direction. Mr. Steward
contended that North American plants have improved their cost,
quality, and service levels to equal those of Japan, but Japanese
management has strengthened their competitive advantage by
transforming their plants into flexible environments.
Flexibility is the ability of a manufacturing
organization to effectively organize and reorganize its resources,
responding to the changing conditions of its environment. Two
concepts should be emphasized in this definition. The first is the
fact that reorganizing is more important than organizing, given
that the world in which we are living is constantly changing. It
is more important to adjust to unforcastable reality than to have
perfect plans that nobody follows. The second has to do with the
source of the unpredictable—the environment. For soft systems
thinkers (as opposed to hard systems, like computers, which are
systems too), the environment is the only element of the
organization that cannot be controlled. For manufacturing
organizations, the environment
has two facets: the extrinsic (i.e. the demand,
the customers, the offer, the vendors), and the intrinsic (i.e.
the products, the process, the machines, the tools, the material,
and above all, the human being).
Control, in the sense here described, implies
the level of complexity as we try to analyze the possible
alternatives in each of the elements of the environment. Given the
level of uncertainty, it is impossible to generate all the various
states that are required to keep the system stable. The more
variety we generate, the more complex plant operations will
become. This presents us with one of the classical dilemmas of
manufacturing—between production and sales. Meanwhile, those
responsible for sales and marketing request high levels of
variety, whereas those in production look at these requests as
degrees of complexity (see Figure 1). There has to be an adequate
balance between flexibility and focalization, without affecting
any of them. This presents a paradox: the level and the depth of
discipline we are ready to impose on a plant will also decide the
type of flexibility we will obtain from it.
To be Continued
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