As the global trend toward outsourcing and decentralization of manufacturing continues to gather momentum, business managers and process designers alike find themselves facing a new set of challenges. Simply put, while production batch sizes for any given part get smaller and smaller, moving rapidly toward the "batch-of-one" ideal, customer quality demands are either at the "no-defects-ever" point, or soon will be.
Caught firmly between the batch-of-one rock and the no-defects-ever hard place, manufacturers must find new strategies to keep both their customers and their shareholders satisfied. In today's environment, those strategies nearly always include flexibility as a key component.