Agile manufacturing: framework and its empirical validation

The agile manufacturing is one of the operational strategies which organizations have adopted to beat environmental uncertainties resulting from worldwide economic recession, shortening of product life cycle, supplier constraints and obsolete technologies. In our study, we have adopted literature review to develop agile manufacturing (AM) framework. Our framework has six constructs that includes technologies, empowerment of workforce, customer focus, supplier relationship management, flexible manufacturing systems and organizational culture. To test our framework, we developed our instrument scientifically and collected data using Dillman’s (2007) total design test methods. We further performed a nonresponse bias test and then we checked the assumptions of constant variance, outliers and normality. Once we found that our dataset skewness and kurtosis values are within the defined range, we further performed a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) test to check the validity of our constructs. Our multivariate statistical analyses suggest that our proposed framework constructs are valid. The goodness-of-fit indices suggest that our framework is a good fit. Once the model was tested, conclusion, limitations and further directions of our study were outlined.