E-manufacturingfundamental, tools, and transformation
Manufacturing industry worldwide has been facing unprecedented challenges brought by ever changing, global and competitive market conditions as well as changing social demands, regional, governmental and environmental regulations. E-commerce and Internet technologies injected velocity into the front business activities and enabled companies to shift their manufacturing operations from the traditional factory integration philosophy to a supply chain-based e-factory philosophy. It transforms companies from a local factory focus to a global enterprise and business focus. This paper introduces e-manufacturing as a new concept to answer the aforementioned needs of business strategies for complete integration of all business elements including suppliers, customer service network and manufacturing units by leveraging the Internet, web-enabling, tether-free technologies and computational tools. Enabling tools will be introduced to support e-manufacturing includes the ability to monitor the plant floor assets, and predict the variation and performance loss for dynamic rescheduling of production and maintenance operations, and synchronize with other related business actions to achieve a complete integration between manufacturing systems and upper-level enterprise applications. Finally, infotronics technologies for next-generation e-manufacturing transformation are discussed.
e-manufacturing e-business