COLLABORATIVE MANUFACTURING:FRAMEWORK FOR COLLABORATIVE MANUFACTURING

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FRAMEWORK FOR COLLABORATIVE MANUFACTURING

The distributed environment presents new challenges for the design, management, and operational functions in organizations. Integrated approaches for designing and managing modern companies have become mandatory in the modern enterprise. Historically, management has relied on a well- established hierarchy, but, the need for collaboration in modern organizations overshadows the hi- erarchy and imposes networks of interaction among tasks, departments, companies, and so on. As a result of this interaction, three issues arise that make the integration problem critical: variability, culture, and conflicts. Variability represents all possible results and procedures for performing the tasks in the distributed organizations. Variability is inherently present in the processes, but distribution enhances its effects. Cultural aspects such as language, traditions, and working habits impose addi- tional requirements for the integration process of distributed organizations. Lastly, conflicts may represent an important obstacle to the integration process. Conflicts here can be considered as the tendency to organize based on local optimizations in a dual local / global environment. Collaborative relationships, such as user–supplier, are likely to present conflicts when considered within a distrib- uted environment. Communication of essential data and decisions plays a crucial role in allowing organizations to operate cooperatively. Communication must take place in a timely basis in order to be an effective integration facilitator and allow organizations to minimize their coordination efforts and costs.

The organizational distributed environment has the following characteristics (Hirsch et al. 1995):

• Cooperation of different (independent) enterprises

• Shifting of project responsibilities during the product life cycle

• Different conditions, heterogeneity, autonomy, and independence of the participants’ hardware and software environments With these characteristics, the following series of requirements for the integration of distributed organizations can be established as the guidelines for the integration process:

• Support of geographically distributed systems and applications in a multisite production envi- ronment and, in special cases, the support of site-oriented temporal manufacturing

• Consideration of heterogeneity of systems ontology, software, and hardware platforms and net- works

• Integration of autonomous systems within different enterprises (or enterprise domains) with unique responsibilities at different sites

• Provision of mechanisms for business process management to coordinate the information flow within the entire integrated environment

Among further efforts to construct a framework for collaborative manufacturing is Nofs’ taxonomy of integration (Figure 1 and Table 2), which classifies collaboration in four types: mandatory, optional, concurrent, and resource sharing. Each of these collaboration types is found along a human–machine integration level and an interaction level (interface, group decision support system, or computer- supported collaborative work).

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