Agile‐based competence management: the relation between agile manufacturing and time‐based competence management

Agile manufacturing is largely dependent on the capabilities of its people to learn and evolve with change. However, while agile manufacturing uses e‐commerce enabled technology in a decentralized organizational setting, it remains unclear how these individual capabilities should be linked to other organizational resources to create an agile organization. Another important modern management research perspective is the internal resource‐based perspective, resulting in a phenomenon called competence‐based competition with renewed attention for competence management. Competence management comprises the management, building, leveraging and deployment of strategic and operational competencies, the causal relationships and linkages between them, and the way competencies are embedded in organizational and individual resources. In this paper, we explore the relation between agile management and time‐based competence management, and study its adoption in small batch discrete parts manufacturing environments with the help of a coarse fact‐finding survey research.