Establishing a clear and consistent focus, and knowing when to change it, is the essence of manufacturing agility. Factories don’t just make things. Viewed properly, they are where the rubber of corporate strategy meets the road of the marketplace.

Ideally, then, a factory should operate in alignment with competitive business priorities; in short, it should be focused. When a business tries to group too many different products, markets, and technologies into the same manufacturing facility, performance and productivity suffer.

This concept was introduced in 1974 by Wickham Skinner in a much-cited Harvard Business Review article, “The Focused Factory,” and was widely embraced by a manufacturing community then in the throes of a productivity crisis. No one since has convincingly refuted that, in general, focused factories outperform unfocused competitors.

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