An Investigation on Implemented Actions to Improve Responsiveness in Manufacturing Firms

The unpredictability of market requirements is currently challenging manu-facturing firms in addressing the need to be more and more responsive. To meet this need and to gain competitive advantage firms require reconfigura-bility. Literature provides much information on characteristics of reconfigu-rability, but generally restricting the focus on highly automated systems. In order to investigate on reconfigurability characteristics in a broader context, within this paper, three cases of plant reconfiguration were analysed and im-plemented actions were interpreted via the core characteristics of reconfigu-rability. Results allow fostering an extension of definitions of such core characteristics with respect to what stated by literature.