A conceptual framework for unpredictable change in agile manufacturing environment

Unpredictable change modeling is a major affecting factor in agile manufacturing environment. Increasing investment in agility will increase a manufacturing company's ability to thrive through manufacturing turbulent environment. A conceptual framework for such changes is developed and explained. The framework consists of several components: defining uncertainty, unpredictable change pool and environment disturbance, change sensors, analyzing change and decision making process (either managerial or operational) and getting a feedback. The main goal of the framework is to provide the decision makers for adopting a manufacturing system with an instrument that shows how an agile system performs in an environment of unpredictable changes and describes the tools and techniques to identify sources of change, categorize them and suggest methods to tackle their problems.