...interest recent years. Motivated increasing competitive pressure to deliver both cost efficiency and responsiveness as espoused by movements such as JIT, lean, time-based competition, agile manufacturing, to name few, firms have begun recruiting, training, cross-training and using labor resources in new ways. In many cases, the core motivation is to enhance flexibility to enable manufacturing and service systems to respond efficiently to changes in conditions over the short and long term. We use the term workforce agility to refer to this new emphasis in labor practices within the IE field.

Motivated by a desire to make effective use of workforce agility, researchers have been studying new labor practices and have developed models to gain fresh insights into them. Given the technical difficulty of analyzing flexible production and its relation to flexible labor, many fundamental technical challenges remain. Some of these, such as understanding the organizational and behavioral impacts of broadening the activities of the workforce, will require research from disciplines well beyond IE. Others, such as incorporating learning, forgetting, and psychological dimensions into production modeling approaches, will require integration of IE methods with insights from other fields. And some issues, such as how best to schedule a multi-skilled workforce, present new twists on classical IE problems or open up new avenues of modeling, analysis, and application.

Because the range of potential research on workforce agility is so broad, we do not attempt here to provide a comprehensive framework for...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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