AGILE MANUFACTURING IN SMALL AND MEDIUM SCALE ENTERPRISES

Agile manufacturing is a term applied to an organization that has created the processes, tools, and training to enable it to respond quickly to customer needs and market changes while still controlling costs and quality. An enabling factor in becoming an agile manufacturer has been the development of manufacturing support technology that allows the marketers, the designers and the production personnel to share a common database of parts and products, to share data on production capacities and problems particularly where small initial problems may have larger downstream effects. Understand the roles and responsibilities of Six Sigma practitioners. Identify the benefits of Six Sigma as a business improvement methodology. The various process times for manufacturing a mono block pump were obtained from a pump manufacturing industry. A flow diagram showing the process is drawn to reflect the current state of the operation. This makes the redesigned process more effective and efficient. By reducing wastefulness the proportion of value adding time in the whole process rises and speed is increased. This project addresses the application of agile manufacturing concepts to the small scale pump manufacturing industry for increasing the production time and profit level.