Agile response manufacturing – what does it actually mean?

If the goal of agile manufacturing is to keep your organisation ahead of the game then it’s important to understand how this translates into working practices. For the team here at Morgan it means taking a flexible approach to manufacturing and assembling products, while at all times maintaining the quality of our work and adhering to our quality management procedures. Adapting to our customers’ needs and demands without disruption requires a degree of flexibility and preparation so we can accommodate changes in requirements while still manufacturing the products perfectly and consistently.

Agile v Lean

Even when a product is designed for manufacture, something can always happen where external factors affect the design, requiring small or significant changes to the development process. An organisation equipped to handle such changes will be able to adapt its processes and use available resources intelligently to avoid cost increases for the client. Rather than ‘lean’ manufacturing which focuses on stripping out costs from the production process, agile response is about having accurate information and allocating resources appropriately to implement changes as efficiently and with as little impact as possible.

The Morgan Difference

In today’s climate, with its ever present supply chain issues and global delays, we are working hard to find new ways to react quickly to client led change. This is especially important in areas where we’re also involved in the product development process, rather than just production. The extensive relationships we have built with our suppliers means we have the potential to source and use different components, with shorter lead times, supporting our development team who work hand in hand with our manufacturing team.

In fact, we are very fortunate that here at Morgan we have our development engineers in the same building as our manufacturing engineers. This proximity makes day to day communication so much easier and we’ve found that problem solving happens much more effectively face to face. Companies whose teams are in separate locations, regularly find it more challenging to remove friction in the product development process.

At Morgan we run multiple production cells, each dedicated to the different products that we manufacture for our customers. And as we deal with both small batch manufacturing that may occur one week of the month, as well as full time manufacturing that requires continuous lines, it enables us to have the flexibility to turn lines on or off very quickly as they’re all segmented into dedicated cells.

Agile in Reality

For example, we have just started working on a fantastic product that helps sterilise handrails in public spaces, obviously key in the ongoing fight against covid. We found that lead times for certain components increased dramatically and the global component shortage meant drastic price increases happened almost overnight. We were in a position where we received very late notice that one of the components in the device was going to be delayed a few months but our agility allowed us to build up all the devices to a point where they were almost fully assembled. We were then able to source a smaller number of the missing components from local suppliers so we could at least get some completed products out to the customer. As soon as the other components did arrive we were able to complete the final assembly within hours, rather than starting the whole assembly process from scratch at that point which, in a standard lean manufacturing facility would have been the case. Due to the flexibility and agility at Morgan, we were able to part assemble the products and carry out all the required testing and certification beforehand.

To find out how our agile approach could help your business and take your concept to commercialisation, please get in touch.