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Lean or world class manufacturing is being very good at doing the things you can control. Agile manufacturing deals with the things you can NOT control. Agility is the ability to thrive and prosper in an environment of constant and unpredictable change. Here are a few of the reasons that the manufacturing paradigm is changing from mass production to agile manufacturing:

• Global competition is intensifying.
• Mass markets are fragmenting into niche markets.
• Cooperation among companies is becoming necessary, including companies who are in direct competition with each other.
• Customers expect low volume, high quality, custom products.
• Very short product life-cycles, development time, and production lead times are required.
• Customers want to be treated as individuals.

The swift trend towards a multiplicity of finished products with short development and production lead times has lead many companies into problems with inventories, overheads, and inefficiencies. They are trying to apply the traditional mass-production approach without realizing that the whole environment has changed. Mass production does not apply to products where the customers require small quantities of highly custom, design-to-order products, and where additional services and value-added benefits like product upgrades and future reconfigurations are as important as the product itself. Approaches such as Rapid prototyping (RP), rapid tooling (RT), and reverse engineering are helping to solve some of these problems.

Rapid Prototyping - Rapid prototyping is a relatively new class of technology used for building physical models and prototype parts from 3D computer-aided design (CAD) data. Unlike milling machines (which are subtractive in nature), RP systems join together liquid, powder and sheet materials to form complex parts. Layer by layer, RP machines fabricate plastic, wood, ceramic, and metal objects based on thin horizontal cross sections taken from a computer model.

Rapid Tooling - Rapid tooling falls into two categories: 1) advanced methods of making tools using RP technology, an additive process, and 2) advanced methods of making tools using milling technology, a subtractive process. Both are driven from a digital database, which is the key to making it rapid. RP-driven RT accelerates the tool-making process using RP masters that are, in turn, used to produce molds.

Reverse Engineering - Reverse engineering encompasses a variety of approaches to reproducing a physical object with the aid of drawings, documentation, or computer model data. In the broadest sense, reverse engineering is whatever it takes—manual or under computer control—to reproduce something.

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