Whenever I meet with a business owner or executive and try to explain what the agile factory is, I find that it is not easy for me to explain.
I said to myself then, taking inspiration from the book “Positioning the Battle for Your Minds” by Al Ries and Jack Trout, that one way to explain a very new thing is to refer to a known thing to explain, what it is not with respect to it.
Engineering and management schools have been focused on efficiency concepts for decades, and companies are organized along these lines.
In my previous article Exploration or Exploitation? I told that engineering and management schools have been focused on efficiency concepts for decades, and consequently companies are organized in this direction.
To look at organizations aimed at exploring new things, one must point to research centers, or design schools.
In the corporate world perhaps more simply we could take inspiration from companies in the fashion industry forced to renew their product range every season.
A few days ago I met with the CEO of a company that manufactures electromechanical components for the home appliance industry.
We talked about the Agile approach and to foster innovation and the Agile Factory to accelerate new product development.
It was easy for me to make myself understood by explaining what makes this factory different from the classic ones.
The Agile factory is not a factory:
- That builds products already known, in series or small batches even in unit quantities.
- Where marketing, design, production, testing and after-sales service work in separate offices and in sequential logic. An approach normally taken for customer order fulfillment.
- That draws on the assembly departments, machinery and suppliers used for mass production.
- Which develops the new products within the normal flow of customer orders.
With this background, it was easier for me to explain to him what Agile Factory is:
- It is an Agility-based mode of physical product development that, by eliminating the barriers between office and workshop, makes them an elastic, creative and human craft system that can quickly transform ideas into valuable and successful products.”
- People, thanks to “digital prosthetics,” today’s available construction means and Agile mode make the ‘industry a creative workshop.
- Products are conceptualized, designed, built, validated and industrialized in an integrated way and in a very short time.
I realized that the premise of what it is not makes the following easier.
The telling then of the human stories of the development of some products, in the Italian companies where I was able to bring this approach, makes it very concrete.
Companies like Tesla apply this Agile approach, but in such an advanced way and in an international context that it is difficult to bring it as an example to small and medium-sized Italian companies.
