Agile manufacturing assessment model using multi-grade evaluation

In unpredicted industrial environment, being able to adapt quickly and effectively to the changing is key in gaining a competitive advantage in the global market. Agile manufacturing evolves new ways of running factories to react quickly and effectively to changing markets, driven by customized requirement. Agility in manufacturing can be successfully achieved via integration of information system, people, technologies, and business processes. This article presents the conceptual model of agility in three dimensions named: driving factor, enabling technologies and evaluation of agility in manufacturing system. The conceptual model was developed based on a review of the literature. Then, the paper demonstrates the agility evaluation by developing a multigrade assessment model. This model can be used by decision maker to evaluate their current degree of agility. Lastly, the paper examined the conceptual model of evaluation in the State Company for Vegetable Oils Industry in Iraq. The calculation show that the State Company for Vegetable Oils Industry is very agile.

Industrial companies adopt modern manufacturing strategies to gain a competitive advantage in the global industrial market. The principle of economies of scale or mass production was ruled the manufacturing world during the past, resulted an inflexible manufacturing system (Sanchez and Nagi, 2001). However, uncertainty in the industrial environment have been recognized as the main reason of most failures in manufacturing industry (Small and Downey, 1996). Therefore, there was a need for a flexible manufacturing that can successfully deal with unpredictable and continuous change in the operational environment in order to remain competitive. In this way, agile manufacturing was developed as a new manufacturing paradigm beyond the conventional manufacturing systems. Agility in manufacturing can be successfully achieved via the integration of different practices to enable the company to respond quickly to changes (Sharifi and Zhang, 2001). If agile manufacturing implemented properly, speed in the industrial market allowed manufactures to be a head over their competitors. Being the first in the market result some benefits. Among these benefits are creating a time gap with your competitor in the market and winning both the brand and customer loyalty (Youssef, 1992).
However, important issue and questions need to be addressed properly to implement agile manufacturing. For example, how an industrial company clearly identifies the requirements to be agile, what are the capabilities that company need to acquire in order to be agile and how agility of any company could be measured and evaluated. Nabass and Abdallah (2019) examine the impact of agile manufacturing on the business performance. The experimental design was performed by analyzing data collected from 282 industrial companies in Jordan. The hypotheses of the study was construct as whether agile manufacturing is positively impact the business performance in terms of cost, quality, delivery and flexibility. The outcomes was confirm that agile manufacturing is positively impacted on business performance.
The present paper develops a framework to address the driving factors, enabling technologies and evaluating criteria of agility manufacturing. Then, the paper demonstrates the agility evaluation by developing a multi-grade assessment model. This model can be used by decision maker to evaluate their current degree of agility. Lastly, the paper examined the conceptual model of evaluation in the State Company for Vegetable Oils Industry in Iraq.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Many industrial strategies such lean manufacturing, six sigma, and total predictive maintenance were adopted by industrial companies in order to improve production efficiency (Ketan and Yasir, 2015). These strategies focus on reducing the wastages and improve productivity as maximum as possible. However, none of these strategies focus on how industrial companies can cope with dynamic, unpredictable, and constantly changing in the industrial environments. In the face of that, the agile manufacturing paradigm was introduced in response to unexpected changes as a basis to provide sustainable competitive advantage ( 102 have been developed from both academics and industrial communities in this topic. Agility has been defined in different ways. For example, Christopher and Towill (2000) defined agility as a business process that is capable of integrating organizational structures, information systems, logistics processes. Cho et al. (1996) defined agility as a manufacturing system that able to rapidly respond to unpredictable changes in customers' demands with high productivity and quality. Gunasekaran (1998) added that agility is not just being able to face current demand, it also about being able to respond to future changes. It can summarized from above that agility definitions comprised both characteristics of adaptability and flexibility. Based on that, agile manufacturing is a demand-driven rather than forecast-driven (Christopher et al., 2004).
In terms of outcomes, Goldman et al. (1995) defined agility as the ability of industrial company to succeed and growth in a continuous and unanticipated changing market. Youssef (1994) point out that agility is not just speed of doing things, it is the proper way of using technology into manufacturing to take advantages of changes as the windows of opportunities. According to Dove (1994), the concept of agility is divided into four dimensions: cost, time, quality, and scope, where the agility of an enterprise can be achieved by comprised these four dimensions in a perfect balance. Another conceptual model of agility was proposed by Yusuf et al. (1999) includes four core concepts named: core competence management, virtual enterprise, capability for reconfiguration, and knowledge-driven enterprise.

THE CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF AGILITY MANUFACTURING
Agility concept is not yet clearly defined and conceptualized. However, a general agility attributes could be defined in terms of responsiveness, flexibility, integration, customized products, speed and culture of change (Osinga, 2019). As industrial environment experiences increasing in uncertainties and unpredictability, industrial companies have to become agile in order to stay in the business. Based on the finding from the literature, this section identifies the concept of agility through three dimensions. These dimensions are drivers of becoming agile, key enablers of agility, and evaluating criteria of agility manufacturing as shown in Fig. 1.

Agility drivers
Agility drivers is the changing in the industrial and business environment that drive a company to consider moving to agility manufacturing system as a basis to provide sustainable competitive advantage (Lin et al., 2006). Agility drivers are further breakdowns as follows:  Technology. The introduction of more efficient, faster and economic manufacturing system increase the ability of industrial companies to listen to their customers, and to try out new things (Yusuf et al., 1999).  Customer requirements. Instability in the market due to the widening customer choice and expectation was the most compelling drivers of agile manufacturing (Yusuf et al.,  1999).  Competing. US industries were embarrassed with a recession which hit its in 1991 and 2008. This stressed the need to formulate a new manufacturing strategy for global competition (Gunasekaran et al., 2018).

Agility enablers
An appropriate integration between different practices is required to enable a company to become an agile manufacturing. In this section, five enabling capabilities are discussed as follows:  Virtual enterprise. According to Sharp et al. (1999), virtual enterprise means that a company is capable of forming temporary alliances for development a specific product during specific time. Then the co-operation is dissolved when the company move to another product development. Gunasekaran (1998) defines virtual enterprise as the ability of a company to reengineering its manufacturing process quickly to meet the changing in the demand.  Concurrent engineering. It is a systematic approach that is used by company to reduce product development costs and reduce product modifications after it is launched (Cho et al., 1996). For example, during product development, it is important that all the product related information is well documented and illustrated (Gunasekaran, 1998).  Shop floor control system. It concerns with advance equipment such as material handling, machining, assembly, and inspection. In order to be agile, a full automatic control system in the shop floor must be established (Cho et al., 1996).  Human resources. Agility is a result of highly-skilled and motivated people that are able to work as a team in order to take the advantage of flexible and smart technology (Vázquez-Bustelo et al., 2007).  Integration. To achieve agility, it necessary to establish a system which is consist of three types of integration: human-human integration, human-technology integration and technology-technology integration (Wong and Whitman, 1999).

Agility evaluation
Based on the core concept of agility, such as rapidly obtaining the information of the demand, and develop a product in responding to this information utilizing advance technologies. Therefore, agility evaluation is divided into organization management, product design and manufacturing process as follows (Yang and Li, 2002): Journal of Engineering Volume 26 November 2020 Number 11 104  Organization management. This index involves three indices as follows: knowledge management, inter-organization management, and organization framework  Product design. This index involves three indices as follows: customer demand information, speed of product design, product design flexibility  Manufacturing process. This index involves three indices as follows: re-configurable, speed of manufacturing, and manufacture flexibility.
A more detailed description of agility evaluation is given in Table 1. The period products design The proportion of design period in products period Products design flexibility The universalization degree of the part The similar degree of products structure Processing manufacture

Re-configurable
The degree of which the company utilise scrap Displacement compatibility

Manufacture speed
The period of manufacturing The proportion of production and technology preparing time in products period

Manufacture flexibility
The universalization degree of the equipment The scalable degree of the equipment

MULTI-GRADE ASSESSMENT OF AGILE MANUFACTURING
This paper uses a multi-grade assessment model to evaluate agility. Table 1 presents three grades of agility evaluation based on the characteristics of agility. Suppose is the manufacturing agility index of each grade, and are the value and the weight of each agility evaluation index, the agility evaluation index system is established as follow: Journal of Engineering Volume 26 November 2020 Number 11 The value of the performance ratings and importance weights of different agility evaluation need to be assessed by experts. The steps to evaluate agility are:  Determine the appropriate scale to assess the performance ratings and importance weights of the agility capabilities.  Measure the performance and importance of agility capabilities.  Compute manufacturing agility index of each grade.  Aggregate assessment calculation.  Match the agility evaluation with an appropriate level as given in Table 2. The assessment model was examined by conducting a case study in an Iraqi manufacturing company. Table 2. Linguistic levels to match agility index.

ASSESSING AGILITY: CASE STUDY
In this section, the procedure of applying the multi-grade assessment model to evaluate agility is given via a practical application in an industrial case study. The State Company for Vegetable Oils Industry in Iraq (SCVOI) is an Iraqi company that concerns on the development and production of a variety of edible fats and cosmetics, detergents, soaps, and oils. The questionnaire used in this study to evaluate agility was prepared on the basis of the existing literature. The questionnaire was checked by two experts in the field of industrial engineering (one practitioner and academics one). The practitioner expert check that the questions are cover all the aspect of agile manufacturing based on his accumulative of experience in this filed, while the academic expert check that the questions are written in accurate format to maximize the outcomes of the questionnaire. The questionnaire was given to plant manager, operations manager, and manufacturing manager. An explanation letter of the purpose of this questionnaire is also given to them. It was assume that respondents based on their position had full access to the information requested in the questionnaire. For convenient calculation, it was suggested that score levels of rating in the range of (0-10). The assessment of each index by the plant manager, operations manager, and manufacturing manager is determined as shown in Table 3.
Being very agile company is meant that this company is a leadership in attracting the customer by achieving excellence level of performance in terms of satisfy the customer requirements. Being able to expect customer requirement is the core of agility manufacturing strategy.

CONCLUSIONS
Competition between industrial companies nowadays is more than quality, delivery, price, and service of products, it is about how to response to changing in the markets at speed. Agile manufacturing is a production system that is developed in response to unexpected changes and dynamic demand as a basis to provide sustainable competitive advantage. This paper explain the concept of agility via three dimensions named: agility drivers, agility enablers and agility evaluation. For each one of these dimensions, a sub-dimension was developed. In general, agility strategy concept could be defined in terms of advance technology, responsiveness, flexibility, integration, customized products, speed and culture of change. The bottom line of this is to reinforce the knowledge of agility and to provide a general view of the current status in agile manufacturing research. With regard to agility evaluation, to ensure that the decision made of evaluation process is not biased, a multi-grade assessment model of agile manufacturing is developed. In this approach, the evaluation process expressed in terms of ranges of value. The potential contribution of this is to provide practitioners a practical procedure of agility evaluation. The model was examined to evaluate the State Company for Vegetable Oils Industry in Iraq. The calculation show that the State Company for Vegetable Oils Industry is very agile. Achieving high level of agility came by the accumulated effort that are represented by the administrative of the company and long experience in the field of designing and manufacturing products. As an example of that high confidence in suppliers, continues surveys of customer requirement, involving workers in making decisions. All of this creating a good atmosphere to be a creative that lead the company to be leadership in the market.