Lean has been called Lean because it uses less of everything; less space, less inventory, less people, less time. Womack and Jones showed this elegantly in their books. But the world of operations is never static. But a new dawn breaks every day, and as Dan Jones has pointed out in the introduction, the concept of Lean is ever-evolving:

• Cusumano and Nobeoka show that the Japanese are now taking longer, using more project managers, and more common parts in 1990 than they were in 1980. Possibly more emphasis is being placed on cost, variety and service rather than on time.
• The use of platforms and modularity is growing in all industries. They look like becoming fundamental building blocks, allowing not only greater product variety and flexibility but also a redefined role for suppliers.
• Waste reduction is still central, but the concept of waste has widened to include the product lifecycle and resource conservation. (See the section on the 5 R's.) Toyota, in a recent supplement in Time magazine said that a car, like a cat, should have nine lives with materials being re-used.
• Benetton manufactures in a network of electronically linked partners.
• VW uses limited assembly outsourcing at its Brazilian plant.
• Ford is moving towards outsourcing final assembly, and the company appears to see itself as a maker of global consumer products and supplier of services rather than a car manufacturer. One assembly contractor comes from within the Fiat group, a direct competitor. Ford will focus on design, branding, marketing and service.
• Daimler-Chrysler uses an in-house out-sourced system of manufacture for its Smart car. Several suppliers have facilities on site.
• The use of "JIT-II" type supplier concepts has grown rapidly since its inception at Bose in 1990.
• Boeing arguably became too lean, being unable to match the sharp increase in demand, thus allowing Airbus to fill the gap.
• The huge rise is remanufacturing has been one of the quiet revolutions of the 1990s, a trend which is certain to accelerate. "Reman" often demands extreme flexibility, and whole new approaches to bills of materials and material control. At the time of writing, no general operations management textbook is known which deals with this significant trend.
• Use of intranets and the internet. For instance, GM Saturn plant's use of a Windows NT-based intranet for monitoring 120,000 control points, and Honda's 24-hour per day world-distributed design process.

There is a great deal of confusion over the term "Agile". Kidd makes the useful statement that Lean Operations are necessary but not sufficient for Agile Manufacturing. Ansari however says that "Lean Production is a broad concept and encompasses terms such as flexible manufacturing, mass customisation, and even agile manufacturing". A supreme example of Agility built on Lean was shown in the case of the Aisin fire. This single-source Toyota supplier of P-valves suffered a catastrophic fire in February 1997. Within days, the network of Toyota suppliers, many of which had no experience in manufacturing these products, were sending to Aisin for inspection prior to shipment to Toyota. The problem-solving mentality and spirit of partnership fostered by Toyota were probably the main reasons why only a few days assembly line production was lost. Other reasons were the breadth and depth of engineering skills, the willingness to solve the problem first and sort out compensation later and the existence of a supplier association. If anything, the experience reinforced the commitment to JIT and Lean.

Naylor, Niam and Berry maintain that Lean and Agility should be looked at from a two dimensional perspective being demand for variety of products and demand for variability of production. Where both are low Lean is more applicable, where both are high Agile is applicable. In between there is a transition. They maintain that different supply chains should be looked at in terms of the location of a "decoupling point" where inventory is held to separate push (or forecast driven) from pull (or kanban driven) production. In make-to-order the decoupling point at raw material, but in make-to-stock inventory is finished goods. Lean, they say, should apply in the pull section. Clearly, this is a limited view of Lean, but may nevertheless be a useful perspective. They finally plump for a new word "Leagility" which integrates Lean and Agile.

Some Agile Manufacturers claim that their aims are different from Lean Manufacturers, but it is difficult to see how. For instance, the "Japanese Manufacturing Twenty First Century Consortium" put forward nine challenges that Agile car manufacturers must address. These are (1) to break dependency on economies of scale - for example through setup reduction, (2) to produce vehicles in low volumes, economically, for example by using product platforms, (3) to aim for a "three day" car (that is the time from placing an order to receiving it to your specification), (4) to have many small assembly plants located close to customers, rather than mega plants, (5) to aim for maximum use of common components, (6) to make work interesting and challenging for operators, (7) to involve the customer in product design, or at least in product specification, (8) to establish supplier partnerships, (9) to analyse data quickly and accurately. To the author, these aims overlap significantly with lean manufacturing.

So what is "Agile"? A quick view is that Flexibility has been added to the Cost, Quality and Delivery objectives of Lean. A = (C+Q+D)+F. Probably a fair description is that it extends Lean Operations with the best in computer networking, the best in creative teamworking, the best in appropriate automation, the best in environmentally-conscious operations and the best in customer service. An example would be the US grocery firm Webvan which operates Internet ordering but for 50k items against the typical 30k offered in a US supermarket, and free delivery for orders over $50. It achieves this by through impressive Internet technology, but also by detailed attention to waste in facility costs, order picking and logistics. Order pickers move a maximum of 6.5m, tote bags are a careful compromise, local transfer stations are used and delivery routes optimised. Building costs and inventories are sharply down. From total energy and space perspectives there are huge savings over conventional supermarkets.

From a wider perspective, "Agility" involves bringing together core skills and competencies from several organisations in order to achieve convenience, flexibility, cost and service. An agile partnership may be for a short or longer period, and will involve partners who often regard each other as equals irrespective of differences in size. The important thing is that each partner brings certain unique core skills to the party.

An Agile manufacturer may be a "virtual" organisation (like virtual computer memory) which may not exist physically as one unit, but appears to customers as a single unit. An agile manufacturer may be dominated by a single organisation (referred to as a "prime web") or not (referred to as a "democratic web"). In a prime web, the largest company may not be the prime site - what counts is the core product.

Benetton is an agile manufacturer of the prime web type, which co-operates with many designers and manufacturers in Italy, and with many shops throughout the world, most of which use the name but are privately owned. Benetton itself also contributes design and manufacturing competence but leverages itself with computer technology. In another case, Ross Operating Valves of Georgia USA uses its own CAD software capability to design valves on a customer's site, and then download to its own manufacturing facilities or those of a third party which may be better placed geographically. Mass customisation principles are applicable in both these cases. See the separate section.

Agility has been boosted in recent years by advances in computer and telecommunications technology. An example is the Boeing 777 which used common CAD software amongst all participating companies, enabling each to keep abreast with all others, and allowing simulated "walk through" of the aircraft as it developed. In the case of the 777, even companies that were competitors on other projects shared the same software. Geographical location was of no concern. Moreover, the software will allow the partners to cooperate in the thousands of modifications that are expected during the life of the aircraft.

With the extension of Internet use, the possibilities for establishing and running agile manufacturing improves every day. Small companies and even individuals are already members of agile or virtual manufacturing companies. Thus an agile or virtual manufacturer may be able to, simultaneously, achieve fast time to market, at low cost, whilst minimising risk, and gaining access to markets beyond the scope of most of the partners taken individually.

Some agile manufacturers may be latent partnerships, lying in wait for new project opportunities to which they can respond instantly with ready-to-go people and facilities, which most single organisations would find hard to match. Other agile manufacturers may comprise companies that compete in one part of the world but cooperate in another part of the world.

A requirement for an agile manufacturer comprising several partners is that all have compatible equipment and software. This makes it possible for (say) a design house to download to suppliers and assemblers who in turn should synchronise their schedules electronically. For this to succeed, members of a virtual or agile grouping should prequalify. Many of the activities described in the Supplier Partnership section of this book are relevant. The U.S. government CALS (computer aided logistics system) has established standards for documentation which are beginning to be adopted worldwide. Some other organisations having similar objectives are given below.

Further Reading
Joseph C. Montgomery and Lawrence Levine (eds), The Transition to Agile Manufacturing, ASQC Quality Press, Milwaukee, 1996. ISBN 0-87389-347-6
Steven Goldman, Roger Nagel, Kenneth Preiss, Agile Competitors and Virtual Organisations, van Nostrand Rienhold, New York, 1995. ISBN 0-442-01903-3
Michael Cusumano and Kentaro Nobeoka, Thinking Beyond Lean, The Free Press, New York, 1998, ISBN 0-684-84918-6
Toshihiro Nishiguchi and Alexandre Beaudet, The Toyota Group and the Aisin Fire, Sloan Management Review, Fall 1998, pp49-59
J Ben Naylor, Mohamed Niam, Danny Berry, "Leagility: Integrating the lean and agile manufacturing paradigms in the total supply chain", Int Jnl of Production Economics, 59, 1998