Align Agile Drivers, Capabilities and Providers to Achieve Agility: a Fuzzy-Logic QFD Approach

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world faces profound changes in many aspects, especially marketing competition, technological innovations and customer demands. A world-wide dispersion of education and technology has led to intense and increasingly global competition and an accelerated rate of change in the marketplace and innovation. There is a continuing fragmentation of mass markets into niche markets, as customers become more demanding with their increasing expectations. This critical situation has led to major revisions in business priorities, strategic vision, and the viability of conventional and even relatively contemporary models and methods developed thus far [1]. To cope with these changing competitive markets, as well as the ability to meet customer demands for increasingly shorter delivery times, and to ensure that the supply can be synchronized to meet the peaks and troughs of the demand are obviously of critical importance [2, 3]. Hence, companies now require a high level of maneuverability encompassing the entire spectrum of activities within an organization. Consequently, agility in addressing new ways to manage enterprises for quick and effective reaction to changing markets, driven by customer-designed products and services, has become the dominant vehicle for competition [4]. Generally, agility benefits can mass customization, increase market share, satisfy customer requirements, facilitate rapid introduction of new products, eliminate non-value-added activities, reduce product costs and increase the competitiveness of enterprises. Accordingly, agility has been advocated as the business paradigm of the 21st century, being considered the winning strategy for becoming a global leader in an increasingly competitive market of quickly changing customer requirements [5-7]. However, the ability to build agility has not developed as rapidly as anticipated, because the development of technology to manage an agile enterprise is still in progress [4, 6, 8]. Thus, in embracing agility, many important questions must be asked, such as: Precisely what is agility, and how can it be measured? How will companies know when they possess this attribute since no simple metrics or