We have previously looked at the paths that build Agile production from Agile machines and Agile cells. We will take a broad view here of production and include all the functions that satisfy a customer opportunity. To put the outsourcing alternative in perspective here, new product design and engineering is the latest wrinkle. From the enterprise point of view, Agile production is achieved when the makeup and relationships of the enterprise's production resources are easily adapted to the precise needs of the moment, and a fleeting moment it is. The internal strategy breaks the company into independent functional resource units that look like one big job shop - where units bid on work based on their performance capabilities.
Some units learn and improve, others get traded out, shut down, or simply ignored to death.
Subsidies are replaced with local profit responsibility and investment authority. Nucor Steel has decentralized decision making so much that plant managers find their own raw materials, find their own customers, and set their own production quotas. Sure, there are inefficiencies to be gained with centralized purchasing . These are not lonely ideas, an irrefutable success base abounds. Nor are they a swing of the centralize-decentralize cycle seen in older corporations with history.