文档介绍：Manufacturing Technology Facing the 21st Century
Manufacturing
Rapid, severe, and uncertain change is the most unsettling market reality panies 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 innovation 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 prehensive response to the challenges posed by a business environment dominated by change and uncertainty.
For pany, to be agile is to be capable of operating profitably in petitive environment of continually and unpredictably changing customer opportunities.
For an individual, to be agile is to be capable of contributing to the bottom line of pany that is constantly anizing its human and technological resources in response to unpredictably changing customer opportunities.
But marketplace change is only one dimension of petitive pressures panies and people are experiencing today. At a deeper level, we are changing from petitive environment in which mass-market products and services were standardized, long-lived, information-poor and exchanged in one-time transactions to an environment in pete globally with niche market products and s