Glossary of Terms
A
- Agile Enterprise
- An agile enterprise is a fast moving,
adaptable and robust business. It is capable of rapid adaptation
in response to unexpected and unpredicted changes and events,
market opportunities, and customer requirements. Such a business
is founded on processes and structures that facilitate speed,
adaptation and robustness and that deliver a coordinated enterprise
that is capable of achieving competitive performance in a highly
dynamic and unpredictable business environment that is unsuited
to current enterprise practices
-
- Agile Manufacturing
- Assumes the business environment is subject
to conditions of continuous change, uncertainty and unpredictability.
An Agile approach requires an ability to easily reconfigure strategies,
structures and processes and to continuous review company market
positioning and the business environment.
-
- Agility
- The ability to change and reconfigure
the internal and external parts of the enterprise - strategies,
organisation, technologies, people, partners, suppliers, distributors,
and even customers in response to change, unpredictable events
and uncertainty in the business environment. See also Internal
Agility and External Agility.
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C
- Change Competency
The key meaning of agility - a core competency, being the ability
to change and cope with massive uncertainties. Change competency
is measured in terms of five performance metrics - time, cost,
scope, stability and frequency.
-
- Clock Speeds
- The life cycle from concept to death for
products, concepts, technologies etc. which varies not only across
industries but within industries for different product components,
services and enterprise techniques.
-
- Core Competencies
- Technologies and skills that (i) provide
the potential to gain access to a wide variety of markets; (ii)
offer significant enhancement of the perceived benefits of goods
and services; (iii) are difficult to copy, and (iv) are not necessarily
obvious to outsiders.
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E
- Enterprise Design
- An approach to change which seeks to design
individual enterprises to meet specified and changing requirements.
Stands in contrast to the prescriptive "copy cat" best
practice approaches.
-
- External
Agility
- The ability to change and reconfigure
the external parts of the enterprise - partners, suppliers, distributors,
and even customers in response to change, unpredictable events
and uncertainty in the business environment. See also Agility
and Internal Agility.
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F
- Fractal Factory
- German techno-speak for lean production.
Involves repeating pattern of goals (self similarity) as one
moves down from the top company level through departments to
the individual. Based on well known practices and techniques
- goal decomposition to develop local performance measures, team
working, empowerment, process focus, etc.
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G
- Globalisation
A complex process involving the opening up of world markets to
competition, the emergence of new markets, deregulation, the
spread of industrial society and the wide variety of company
and sector specific responses to this complexity.
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H
- Holonic Architecture
This is an alternative to the hierarchical architecture found
in organisations and in technologies and manufacturing systems.
Holonic architecture is not based on physical structure but on
functions or tasks that need to be undertaken, and this description
is independent of the means of realisation. Application of self
similarity concepts means that the definition of any top level
holon is replicated in all component holons.
- Holons
- Autonomous but cooperating units within
a structure. Holons can be people or tasks, or technological
sub-systems designed to behave as holons, or even whole companies.
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I
- Internal
Agility
- The ability to change and reconfigure
the internal parts of the enterprise - strategies, organisation,
technologies, and even people in response to change, unpredictable
events and uncertainty in the business environment. See also
Agility and External
Agility.
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K
- Knowledge-based Systems
- A computer programming paradigm where
knowledge is separated from program control. This technique enables
applications that involve developing systems that can mimic expert
knowledge in well defined areas, or which can be used for more
complex and less well defined areas to give advice about consequences
of decisions, or add to knowledge, or provide expert advice from
one domain to experts in other domains.
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L
- Lean Production
- An enterprise paradigm concerned with
doing more with less. Involves continuous efforts to eliminate
waste of all kinds, such as inventory, stocks, time spent waiting,
etc. Often confused with agility, lean enterprises are however
fragile in that they only have limited capabilities to handle
change, uncertainty and unpredictability, while agile enterprises
are designed to thrive under such conditions.
-
- Learning Organisation
- Enterprises that systematically learn
from mistakes, experience, experimentation etc. and then diffuse
the new knowledge throughout the organisation.
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M
- Mass Customisation
- Production of individually personalised
goods and service at mass production prices. Enabled by concepts
such as lean production, IT systems, late configuration, product
modularisation.
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N
- Next Generation Manufacturing Enterprise
- Post mass/lean production enterprise,
operating is a post mass consumption society. The next generation
enterprise is founded on the supporting strategies of agility,
niche operations, knowledge based wealth creation.
-
- Nimble Manufacturing
- A term used by Ford as part of its Ford
2000 Program. As a term internal to Ford it could mean the same
as agile, or lean, or flexible manufacturing or mass customisation.
Ford 2000 itself however is a major reorganisation program which
has involved the creation of a single global company from all
of Ford's Automotive operations in North America and Europe,
the reorganisation of product development into platform teams
based upon a matrix structure, and the pursuit of a strategy
of building more product variety off fewer vehicle platforms
and exploiting niche markets for vehicles as well as volume vehicle
production.
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O
- Open Systems Concept
Applicable to technology, management and enterprise systems.
Implies a system extremely responsive to the systems environment,
easily changed, and parts easily linked.
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R
- Re-configurability
Ability to reconfigure enterprises, technologies, organisations,
virtual corporations etc. in response to rapidly changing circumstances.
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