Manufacturing or servicing industries have to be updated by restructuring or reorganizing in order to overcome the demands of this era in which customers are not only satisfied but also delighted. In this competitive environment, the industries must be a flexible, adaptive and reconfigurable system that can be entitled by a unique term: Agile Manufacturing (AM). An AM system is able to develop a variety of products at low cost and in a short period. In this paper, the enabling technologies and implementation framework is presented.

World-class performance is a moving target that requires constant attention and effort and the process is a never ending journey. In the past, economies of scale ruled the manufacturing world and the mass production and full utilization of plant capacity was the way to make money. This style of manufacturing resulted in inflexible plants that could not be easily reconfigured and consumed lot of raw materials, work in process and finished goods inventories. The needs of the customers are now highly specific and rapidly changing, although they still want to have high-quality and low-cost products/services. That's why the companies in either manufacturing or servicing have to be updated by restructuring or reorganizing in order to overcome the demands of this era in which customers are not only satisfied but also delighted.

Therefore, in this competitive environment, organizations must have a flexible, adaptive and reconfigurable paradigm that can be entitled by a unique term: Agile Manufacturing (AM). AM is a response to complexity brought by constant change in the modern manufacturing world and it is a useful and beneficial approach to reduce the development time and manufacturing cost while simultaneously improving the quality of a product to better respond to the customer expectations. The paper discusses AM characteristics, some enabling technologies of AM, AM implementation framework and finally presents the conclusion.

Manufacturing organizations are continuously changing in response to a competitive environment. Based on the study of Cheng et al. (2000), Figure 1 shows some notable changes in the manufacturing industry. The concept of AM was introduced in 1991 by a government sponsored research effort at Lehigh University and came into common usage with the publication of the report: ``21^st century Manufacturing Enterprise Strategy'' by its Iacocca Institute.

Operations Management Journal, Enabling Technologies, Agile Manufacturing, Agile Manufacturing Enterprise Forum, Virtual Manufacturing, Web-based Engineering, Design Engineering, Information Technology, Business Goals, Computer Numerical Control, Central Network Server, Concurrent Engineering, Object Oriented Programming, Process Reengineering, Organizational Restructuring.