MAFF is founded by Dr. Ng Yan Goh with the vision of providing the Agility and Futures knowledge base for the Malaysian enterprises to be globally competitive. Cheap labour is no longer the criterion for the MNC's to set up production facilities in Malaysia nor the basis for the local manufacturers to be competitive globally. What is needed is the critical resource, people, who are knowledgeable and agile. It is about leading and managing the human resources to provide the products and services which are able to give total customer satisfaction in a rapidly changing and volatile marketplace.

Advanced organisations in the US are not alone in their pursuit of Agility as the strategy for the future. In Europe, it is being pursued as the Fractal Enterprise, inspired by Professor Hans-Jurgen Warnecke's book, The Fractal Company: A Revolution in Corporate Vulture. In Japan, it has been driven for some time by the benchmark project documented by Womack et al. in The Machine That Changed the World. The Malaysia-based organisations have to look at Agility as a strategy to develop globally competitive organisations. Malaysia cannot rely on the migrant workers in the long term and already these people are being sent home gradually. We need to review the total process management and ensure all processes are virtually integrated and simplified.

Throughout the TQM era, companies were struggling to make it work because they did not apply TQM holistically. They did not concurrently advance leadership and culture to enable fundamental improvement in processes. On the other hand, the failure of business process re-engineering (BPR) centres around the same problems of the constraints of existing management practices and workforce. Both TQM and BPR failures have been attributed largely to the corporate immune system: the entrenched culture.

Becoming Agile requires you to re-invent your organisation. It requires you to advance to an empowered, entrepreneurial business culture, transitioning from "silo" functions to supply chains, from command and control management to total process management, and from job holders to business people. It is not just using tools and developing new procedures or systems but a holistic approach of learning how to work together, to trust and to share. Companies will have to integrate internally, nationally and then globally, to achieve significant and fundamental advances in capability, using more electronic commerce technology.

No doubt it is difficult to predict the future but MAFF is committed also to help organisations to develop the innovative and creative power of the people to be able to plan for the future by developing products and services which has fast concept to cash capability. The futuristic organisations must be able to thrive in the global village.