Designing for manufacturing flexibility: a newsvendor approach

With today’s fast paced technology advancement, flexibility has emerged as a strategic imperative for the viability of business enterprises. Central to the success of any flexibility initiative, is the prudent design and selection of production systems to meet the needs of a concern in an uncertain environment. In this paper, we extend the newsvendor problem to optimise the selection of equipments for different flexibility classes and present a numerical example to show the application of the developed model. Though geared towards manufacturing, the model can be extended to other areas such as that of supply chain flexibility.