Abstract
Today’s business environment is characterized by fast-changing technologies and shorter product life-cycles, well-educated customers and fierce competition. Within this context, agile manufacturing is praised in the literature as one of the solutions for achieving and maintaining a competitive advantage in turbulent times. This paper is aimed to fill in the identified theoretical and empirical gaps by exploring and scrutinizing the agile manufacturing concept in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the FAN manufacturing industry in Pakistan. Furthermore, a model illustrating the agile manufacturing enablers praised in literature and useful for studied industry is developed. A questionnaire has been developed based on the agile manufacturing enablers in the literature. Then a survey has been conducted on the developed questionnaire to find the application of praised agile manufacturing enablers in the industry and the extent of application. Result of the survey has shown that the agile manufacturing enablers are partially applied in the studied industries. Nevertheless, a conscious awareness of the agile manufacturing concept itself was not found and the enablers identified were rather described as logical business thinking.