2 These investments, however, may not yield full value. Targeted performance improvements and competitive advantages may not reach their full potential. Without interface standards, communication protocols, and other key infrastructural technologies, efforts to integrate new equipment and processes into existing operations and systems will continue to consume inordinately large amounts of money, time, and staff. Beyond the internal operations of individual firms, opportunities to leverage the capabilities of partners and to develop closer relationships with customers may go unrealized. In this distributed, multi-project testbed, which links people, facilities, and resources at sites around the country, collaborators from NIST, companies, universities, and government laboratories have begun the critical task of developing, demonstrating, testing, and refining prototype standards for achieving integration and interoperability within and across systems, factories, and enterprises.
Effective collaboration is key to accomplishing the testbed's ambitious technical goals.
Successful partnering is a long-standing tradition at NIST and its Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory. The NAMT's predecessor is the Automated Manufacturing Research Facility, launched in the 1980's to focus on standards and measurement issues in factory-floor automation. This research factory of the future fostered a new, productive style of collaboration that delivered useful technical results to U.S. industry. Times have changed, and the NAMT is responding to new challenges that confront the U.S. manufacturing sector. To respond effectively, it is pioneering new modes of collaboration.