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Paul T Kidd's Agility Pages
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Agility Press QuotesThese quotes by Paul T. Kidd, one of the world's leading experts on agility and next generation manufacturing, may be used by journalists looking for quotes to use in articles: "Agility is a core competency - it is the capability to respond in a satisfactory manner to change, uncertainty and unpredictability in the wider business environment." "Agility can be measured by five performance measures - cost of change, time to change, stability of change, scope of change, and frequency of change. These five measures can be applied to just about anything in a company that needs to be modified in response to change, uncertainty and unpredictability in the business environment. On a scale of 1 to 10, few companies today would even score 1 on a single measure, let alone all five. What companies need to achieve are top marks on all five, and the capability to apply such a competence to all areas that are of strategic importance (technologies, suppliers, etc.)." "An important difference between mass customisation and agility is this. Mass customisation delivers customised products at mass production prices. Agility is an ability to respond to change, uncertainty and unpredictability in the business environment, whatever its source - customers, competitors, new technologies, suppliers, government regulation, etc." "Many companies that have gone down the mass customisation road are in fact not agile. They use techniques such as product modularity and standardised components to offer customers wider choice. But that choice is nevertheless restricted, even though it is often very large. If a customer comes and asks for something that is outside the envelope of options, then many mass customisers would not be able to respond. An example would be the PC manufacturer that offers several hundred (essentially predefined) product options through modularization, but cannot respond to a customer request for an application specific integrated circuit, simply because the manufacturer has decided or assumed or been told by customers that such an option is not needed. In a constantly changing world this is dangerous. An agile company would be able to deal with such exceptions rapidly and without increasing costs." "The biggest problem with agility is that 99 percent of those that advocate the concept are in fact talking about lean production. People have just not realised that agility draws it inspiration from the world of one-of-a-kind and job shop thinking rather than from flow line production." "History shows us that mass production was initially only understood by a small number of pioneers. Many managers and engineers simply did not appreciate what was going on in companies like Ford and General Motors. The same situation arose with lean production. Outside of Toyota and Honda, there was initially little appreciation of the techniques used by these pioneers. Today of course, both mass and lean are widely understood. Agility is currently at the stage where few, possibly only a handlful world wide, really know what this is all about." "There is a high probability that what you have heard about agility is mis-information. More likely what you have picked up is a description of practices that fit better under the label lean production. You should be wary of any descriptions of agility - they nearly always turn out to be descriptions of lean companies." "Agility is a next generation manufacturing concept. It belongs in the 21st century and does not fully exist in any company today. The challenge for the future is to create agile companies using technologies, organisational forms and people to develop a new form of manufacturing that transcends existing mind sets that are becoming increasingly dominated by the dogma of lean production." "If agility does not scare you, then you have not fully understood what it is about."
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