eManufacturing: Exploiting IT in Design and Supply Chains

Authors: Anantaram Balakrishnan, Soundar R. T. Kumara, Shankar Sundaresan

Information technology (IT) is both the key enabler for future manufacturing enterprises and a transformer of organizations and markets. By reducing barriers to collaboration, compressing lead time, eliminating physical movement, and enriching decision-making, IT helps manufacturers achieve their goal of meeting customer needs better, quicker, and cheaper. The global reach and easy connectivity that information technology provides has fostered cooperation while increasing market competition, and heightened customer expectations. Advances in computer and communication technologies combined with rapid changes in organizations have also created new opportunities for exploiting information technologies in the entire product realization process. This paper explores these opportunities, and identifies promising directions for research and systems development. We first review important trends in organizations, markets, and information technologies— from increasing customer involvement and opportunistic organizational alliances to global reach and connectivity, enterprise integration, and virtualization. Adopting a process viewpoint of the product realization cycle, we translate these trends into high-impact IT applications in design and operations that offer rich potential for applied research and development. Underlying these applications are four broad classes of intelligent information processes—intelligent search, diagnosis and prognosis, collaboration, coordination, and negotiation, and understanding and learning. Software agents provide an ideal platform to implement these processes. Our goal is to synthesize streams of thought from many related disciplines in engineering, science, and management, and develop a framework for examining how information technologies can facilitate and influence manufacturing.