John Johansen

The emergence of the open markets, reductions in trade barriers, and improvements in transportation and communications links have led to a situation where local competition and markets operate in the context of global standards. As a consequence, today's industrial enterprises face new challenges and competitive pressures. This chapter presents a process for developing a company-specific manufacturing vision to serve as a bridge between corporate strategy and production systems design. A manufacturing vision may include a combination of lean and agile strategic elements suited to the specific situation of the industrial enterprise. The Next-Generation Manufacturing Project at MIT emphasizes agility and customer responsiveness, networking in a global market, employee participation, and integration in an extended enterprise, knowledge management, and competence development. The changed industrial context calls for new capabilities. Therefore, the ability of industrial enterprises to adjust quickly and accurately to changing conditions is an important key to success in the future. Within this process, enterprises must be able to integrate a multitude of technological, organizational and managerial viewpoints. The chapter also presents three case studies to demonstrate different manufacturing visions and explain how elements of agile and lean manufacturing can be combined.