implementation of agile manufacturing principles in small and medium enterprises (smes)

modern manufacturing is under ever increasing pressure to develop solutions for highly complextasks. in order to maintain the business survival in a highly competitive environment, it is vital toobtain customer satisfaction, which requires developing products with shorter lifecycles and higherquality meanwhile to reduce the production costs. in order to achieve such objectives a paradigmhas been developed called “agile manufacturing”. however according to the literature, this tool hasbeen widely used within the large companies, there is still an ongoing research to prove theirapplicability in small and medium enterprises (smes). this paper aims to assess the feasibility ofapplying agile manufacturing principles within smes using 10 case studies in the uk and malaysia.it contributes to theory by being able to identify the main barriers in the implementation of agilemanufacturing by dividing them into three categories namely “lack of management skills”,“technological limitations” and “lack of workforce experience”. it also provides recommendationsfor each aforementioned issue so it could be used as guidelines for the industries to employ thesemethodologies.