外文翻译-敏捷制造.doc

1、Agile manufacturing1.1 IntroductionRapid, severe, and uncertain and uncertain change is the most unsettling market reality that companies and people must cope with today. New products, even whole markets, appear, mutate, and disappear within shorter and shorter periods of time. The pace of innovatio

2、n continues to quicken, and the direction of innovation is often unpredictable, product variety has proliferated to a bewildering degree (Seiko markets 3000 different watches; Philips sells more than 800 color TV models). Agility is a comprehensive response to the challenges posed by a business envi

3、ronment dominated by change and uncertainty.For a company, to be agile is to be capable of operating profitably in a competitive environment of continually, and unpredictable, changing customer opportunities.For an individual, to be agile is to be capable of contributing to the bottom line of a comp

4、any that is constantly reorganizing its human and technological resources in response to unpredictably changing customer opportunities. But marketplace change is only one dimension of the competitive pressures that company and people are experiencing today. At a deeper level, we are changing from a

5、competitive environment in which mass-market products and services were standardized, long-lived, information poor and exchanged in one-time transactions to an environment in which companies compete globally with niche market products and services that are individualized, short-lived, information ri

6、ch, and exchanged on an ongoing basis with customers.Only those companies that respond to the deeper structural changes taking place in the commercial competition will be able to make sense of and profit from-the superficially chaotic changes occurring at the level of the marketplace. A more complet

7、e definition of agility, then, is that it is a comprehensive response to the business challenges of profiting from rapidly changing, continually fragmenting, global markets for high quality, high performance, customer configured goods and services.Agility is, in the end, about making money in and fr

8、om a turbulent, intensely competitive business environment.1.2 AM-a new manufacturing strategy1.2.1 Tactical and Strategic ReformReforms introduced by companies since the early 1980s to improve their competitiveness; just-in-time logistics, the quality movement and “lean manufacturing”, have been ta

9、ctical responses to marketplace pressures. These reforms aim to improve how companies are doing what they are already doing. Although these efforts are appropriate and valuable, they reflect an acceptance of the status quo, rather than a recognition of the need to confront a new competitive reality,

10、 one that challenges what companies ought to be doing, not just how they can do a better job of what they are already doing.As a matter of fact, most companies have adopted a succession of tactical initiatives without anchoring the rationale for their implementation in new ends that mandate fundamen

11、tal changes, true paradigm shifts in how those companies operate. The result is that, in company after company, disillusionment with the “alphabet soup” of managerial reforms has invariably set in. the disillusionment is not truly a reflection of the failure of the failure of the reforms to deliver

12、on their promises, however. Innovative tactics will always be short-lived unless they are embedded in comprehensive organizational change that is in turn anchored in new strategic goals.Agility challenges the prevailing modes of organization, management, production, and competitiveness. It is explic

13、itly strategic rather than tactical, taking no established practices for granted. Agile competition demands that the processes that support the creation, production, and distribution of goods and services be centered on the customer-perceived value of products. This is very different from building a

14、 customer-centered company. Enhancing the satisfaction that a customer experiences in dealing with a company adds value and can improve focus and even efficiency. But customer-centering a company on product lines that enrich customers-it means that the prices of the products are determined by the va

15、lue customers perceive those products to have for them-moves beyond the traditional mass production system.Successful agile companies, therefore, know a great deal about individual customers and interact with them routinely and intensively. Neither knowledge of individual customers nor interaction o

16、n this level was relevant to mass-production-era competitors. As suppliers of standardized, uniform goods and services, mass-production-era competitors relied on market surveys that created an abstraction: the “average” or “typical” customer. However, individuality could not be accommodated in a mass production competitive environment.By contrast, offering individualized products-not a bewildering list of options and models but a choice of ordering a produc