An investigation on establishing small- and medium-sized enterprises communities under the environment of social manufacturing

Manufacturing industry has become professionalization, socialized, service-oriented, and collaborative, so lots of professional and socialized small- and medium-sized enterprises spring up to provide product–service for satisfying customers’ requirements. Faced with this trend, a new manufacturing mode called social manufacturing has been proposed to aggregate these small- and medium-sized enterprises into communities for mass individualization manufacturing. As the basis of social manufacturing, small- and medium-sized enterprises communities are established by two steps. First, the socialized manufacturing resources of the small- and medium-sized enterprises are described and similar socialized manufacturing resources are clustered into one socialized manufacturing resources community by growing hierarchical self-organizing map algorithm. Suitable socialized manufacturing resources communities are selected and then the socialized manufacturing resources are mapped into small- and medium-sized enterprises. Second, these small- and medium-sized enterprises form a community to complete the order together. Product cost and delivery time serve as the indicator for order allocating in the small- and medium-sized enterprises community. A multi-objective algorithm is proposed to tackle the order allocation problem. A case from a professional printing firm is analyzed to validate the proposed methodology and model. Some rules are revealed and these rules are useful for guiding practical production. The study endorses the establishing small- and medium-sized enterprises communities under the environment of social manufacturing and suggests extensive practical implications.