On the measurement of enterprise agility

Agility metrics are difficult to define in general, mainly due to the multidimensionality and vagueness of the concept of agility itself. In this paper, a knowledge-based framework is proposed and presented as a candidate solution for the measurement and assessment of manufacturing agility. Given an enterprise, in order to calculate its overall agility, a set of quantitatively defined agility parameters is proposed and grouped into production, market, people and information infrastructures. The combined, resulting, measure incorporates the individual and grouped infrastructure agility parameters and their variations into one calculated value of the overall agility. The necessary expertise used to quantitatively determine and measure individual agility parameters is represented via fuzzy logic terminology that allows for human-like knowledge representation and reasoning. An example demonstrates the feasibility and applicability of the proposed approach.