A roadmap towards agility for Finnish manufacturing companies
Lammervo, Eemeli (2015)
2015
Konetekniikan koulutusohjelma
Teknisten tieteiden tiedekunta - Faculty of Engineering Sciences
This publication is copyrighted. You may download, display and print it for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2015-06-03
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201505201389
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201505201389
Tiivistelmä
Companies have to deal with continuous and unpredictable changes in today’s challenging business environment. Agility means a capability of a company to react rapidly and efficiently to changes. The objective of this thesis is to create a roadmap, which helps Finnish manufacturing companies to identify and prioritize actions that are needed in order to improve their agility.
The thesis is divided into two parts: theoretical part and empirical part. The theoretical part consists of literature review, which presents concepts and models related to agility. The purpose of the literature review is to identify tools, practices and characteristics that enable agility in a manufacturing company. The identified enablers of agility are utilized in the empirical part of the thesis, as challenges related to agility are investigated.
The empirical part of the thesis focus on analysing challenges that Finnish manufacturing companies have related to agility, and proposing actions for solving these challenges. Interviews conducted among 25 Finnish manufacturing companies operating in machine building industry, were utilized to collect challenges and needs regarding production planning and control. Based on the conducted interviews, altogether 50 challenges affecting agility were identified. Most of the interviewed companies are not using correct IT-systems in production planning and control to support rapid reactions to changes. Furthermore, the usage of paper documents in data collection from the factory floor, and the lack of systematics in recording different type of deviations are causing several problems. Due to these challenges, information of change situations is not transferred to all factors in real time. Based on the conducted cause-effect analysis, the above mentioned challenges are critical to be solved in order to increase agility among the interviewed companies. For solving challenges, 13 practical actions were proposed. The most important actions for the critical challenges include implementation of new manufacturing IT-systems, increasing automatic data collection, and bringing needed information to production workers in digital format.
As main results of this thesis, two visualized maps are introduced. The relationships map presents the interconnections between the identified challenges. It can be utilized in identifying how different problems are generated and what kind of consequences they have. The action map presents practical actions for solving identified challenges. It guides manufacturing companies in evaluating the importance of different actions that can be implemented in order to improve agility. Together these two maps serve as roadmaps for Finnish manufacturing companies towards agility.
The thesis is divided into two parts: theoretical part and empirical part. The theoretical part consists of literature review, which presents concepts and models related to agility. The purpose of the literature review is to identify tools, practices and characteristics that enable agility in a manufacturing company. The identified enablers of agility are utilized in the empirical part of the thesis, as challenges related to agility are investigated.
The empirical part of the thesis focus on analysing challenges that Finnish manufacturing companies have related to agility, and proposing actions for solving these challenges. Interviews conducted among 25 Finnish manufacturing companies operating in machine building industry, were utilized to collect challenges and needs regarding production planning and control. Based on the conducted interviews, altogether 50 challenges affecting agility were identified. Most of the interviewed companies are not using correct IT-systems in production planning and control to support rapid reactions to changes. Furthermore, the usage of paper documents in data collection from the factory floor, and the lack of systematics in recording different type of deviations are causing several problems. Due to these challenges, information of change situations is not transferred to all factors in real time. Based on the conducted cause-effect analysis, the above mentioned challenges are critical to be solved in order to increase agility among the interviewed companies. For solving challenges, 13 practical actions were proposed. The most important actions for the critical challenges include implementation of new manufacturing IT-systems, increasing automatic data collection, and bringing needed information to production workers in digital format.
As main results of this thesis, two visualized maps are introduced. The relationships map presents the interconnections between the identified challenges. It can be utilized in identifying how different problems are generated and what kind of consequences they have. The action map presents practical actions for solving identified challenges. It guides manufacturing companies in evaluating the importance of different actions that can be implemented in order to improve agility. Together these two maps serve as roadmaps for Finnish manufacturing companies towards agility.