Scoring and multi-grade fuzzy assessment of agility in an Indian electric automotive car manufacturing organisation

Agility is the performance measure of agile manufacturing (AM) practices and with the increasing adoption of AM systems its assessment has gained in importance. This study has been undertaken to fill the observed research gap that no research has been attempted to validate an agility assessment result using an alternative effective method. The agility assessment of an Indian electric automotive car manufacturing organisation has been done using a scoring approach and validated using an effective multi-grade fuzzy method. The result indicates that the organisation was agile to an extent of 84.1% using the scoring approach and 7.05 using the multi-grade fuzzy method, which implies the organisation is agile. The gap analysis results indicate that the largest gap is observed in the case of 'nature of management' criterion followed by 'devolution of authority', 'customer response adoption' and 'employee involvement'. Necessary actions were taken for the improvement of these agility gaps. The improvement in agile performance measures is 7.7 to 9.7 (on a Likert scale of range 0-10) after the implementation of the suggested proposals. The statistical validation study indicates the feasibility of improvement in agility after the assessment exercise with a practical success rate of 90%.