COLLABORATIVE MANUFACTURING:COORDINATION AND CONTROL REQUIREMENTS IN COLLABORATIVE MANUFACTURING

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COORDINATION AND CONTROL REQUIREMENTS IN COLLABORATIVE MANUFACTURING

An increasing number of companies are basing their future on global markets. The globalization of resources and customers has shifted the focus of industrial companies from resource control to customer-focused control over time (Hirsch et al. 1995). Competitiveness among companies nowadays relies on an increasingly important aspect: time-to-market. Pursuing shorter time-to-market requires faster development cycles for the products and close attention to geographically distributed markets. To cope effectively in this demanding environment, companies frequently engage in collaborative partner relationships, which allow them to focus and coordinate their efforts and improve their po- sition in the market. The collaboration results in an integrated, aligned enterprise composed of several independent companies. Partner companies combine their capabilities in generating new business opportunities to which they could not have access otherwise.

Manufacturing covers a wide range of activities, from early design stages to product recycling. Companies often need to use collaboration between designers, technicians, departments, and divi- sions, or with other companies, to attain the desired results in an efficient way. As the complexity of the problems in manufacturing increases, concurrent engineering teams have resulted the most effective manner in which to tackle them. Concurrent engineering teams are composed of individuals with a wide range of expertise in different areas. This diversity of knowledge and viewpoints provides the team with the view of the manufacturing process necessary for addressing the complexity of the problems. However, to make from concurrent engineering something more than never-ending meet- ings, support to coordinate and control the collaboration must be provided. Coordination allows the cooperative operation of two or more systems in the pursuit of complementary objectives, as well as the efficient utilization of resources and allocation of efforts in the organization(s). Much of the support for the collaboration effort required by concurrent engineering comes from the information technologies and the great advances they have experienced in the last decade. Computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) has been implemented largely for engineering collaboration (Phillips 1998), along with more sophisticated techniques, such as conflict resolution in distributed design (Nof and Huang 1998). The advantages from using information technologies in collaborative man- ufacturing arise from two sources. First, more information can be acquired from teams having com- puter support. Second, information availability makes possible a more objective analysis of the problem in a system view. However, some drawbacks should be kept in mind: information overload, lack of knowledge integration, cooperation, and coordination among team members may render the utilization of CSCW tools completely counterproductive.

A key aspect that any CSCW tool must consider is reconfiguration. Adaptation to constantly changing conditions in the manufacturing industry must be attained through tools providing the enterprise with reconfiguration capabilities. Numerous methods for quick reconfiguration of collaborative engineering initiatives have been developed so far. Methods range from those based on integration requirements of the activities being performed (Khanna and Nof 1994; Witzerman and Nof 1995; and Kim and Nof 1997, among others) to those based on concepts taken from disciplines other than manufacturing (Khanna et al. 1998; Ceroni 1999; and Ceroni and Nof 1999, who extend the parallel computing problem to manufacturing modeling).

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