This paper provides an overview of the framework and tools developed at the Agile Manufacturing and Enterprise Centre (AMEC) at the University of Liverpool to assist Merseyside SME’s in embracing agility concepts. The framework is based on four main pillars; auditing of company, auditing of the operating environment, benchmarking and learning from best practice. This paper describes the overall...

Designers face many challenges when designing products and systems. The marketplace of 2020 will be more global and faster paced than today’s market. As the market expands and is shaped by new technology, a company’s success will depend on how quickly and appropriately it can generate and apply knowledge to a specific problem. ADG’s greatest asset is the knowledge of its employees, so this know...

This paper presents an overview of the Agile Aerospace Manufacturing Research Center (AAMRC) at the Automation & Robotics Research Institute of The University of Texas at Arlington. The AAMRC is an industryled institute funded by the National Science Foundation and the Advanced Research Projects Agency of DoD. The center is a partnership of academia, industry, and state and local government whi...

BENEFITS  Enables manufacturers to manage complex product development activities across organizations, suppliers, and customers  Special suitability for enterprises in the range of manufacturing, machine and equipment construction and automotive supplier  Encapsulates a comprehensive understanding of the product engineering process for Industrial Manufacturing.  By focusing on specific aspe...

Research has shown that organisations are moving towards agile manufacturing in response to a rapidly changing business environment. Agility is the competence of an organisation to respond to unpredictable business forces. This requires that an organisation develop dynamic management systems that are able to support continuous change. This paper examines systems thinking and proposes a holistic...

Agile manufacturing systems can beneet signiicantly from a database support. This paper describes AMDS, an agile manufacturing database system designed for capturing and manipulating the operational data of a manufacturing cell. AMDS is a continuous data gathering , real-time DBMS (Data Base Management System), and it can be logged either locally or remotely and used for oo-line analysis as wel...

The agile electronics manufacturing enterprise must rapidly develop new products by close interaction with their supplier network. Design for manufacturing must occur in this extended and distributed enterprise across traditional organizational boundaries. This paper proposes the use of information models to support this activity. A manufacturing model is built using the EXPRESS information mod...

The characteristics of today's competitive environment, such as the speed with which products are designed, manufactured, and distributed, and the need for higher responsiveness and lower operational cost, are forcing companies to search for innovative ways to do business. The concept of agile manufacturing has been proposed in response to these challenges for companies. This ...