Web-based collaborative innovation systems for Korean small and medium sized manufacturers

Customer needs for final products are very unpredictable due to rapidly changing environmental conditions and technologies. In order to survive in a competitive market, manufacturers should make their parts or products with lower costs and shorter delivery time as well as higher quality specifications. To do so, more than 600 small and medium sized manufacturing companies are using web-based collaboration systems in Korea. Those systems are developed by the government-led program, referred to as i-Manufacturing. The systems support some similar functions in Product Data Management (PDM), Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Project Management System (PMS), etc. if such functions are useful for manufacturers' collaboration. Collaboration systems, however, gradually become complicated by reflecting user requirements for system functions. Hence, the systems become difficult to use under the current system architecture, which is so called function-centric. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new system architecture for collaboration systems, referred to as a process-centric. By applying the process-centric architecture, a user can utilize collaboration systems in an easy manner because the system assists the user to follow appropriate processes or workflows. Even though the user is a beginner, he or she can do the jobs successfully by following the guidance of the system. Main functions of collaboration systems and illustrative case studies are also presented in this paper.