Manufacturing Innovation Strategy via On-line Collaboration

Unpredictable and ever changing customer demands make manufacturers difficult to get competition power enough to survive in the global market. To meet customer requirements dynamically changed. the manufacturing industry of today needs to equip with advanced technologies based on substantial infrastructure. Especially most mold makers in Korea. for example. are in labor shortage and fund starvation. Even though they have any specialized technology. they usually get in trouble to compete with big companies. Under this situation. we found that "collaboration" is the best solution for them to survive and to get competition power. Therefore. we have launched and conducted a project. referred to as an e- Manufacturing project. Note that e- Manufacturing is referred to as a system methodology enabling the integration of manufacturing operations and functional objectives of an enterprise by using intelligent IT technologies such as Internet. tether-free communication methods including wireless networking or web-based connections. In order to provide on-line collaboration environment. we have developed five kinds of hub systems for collaborative design and production of molds as well as parts/modules of an automobile while conducting e-Manufacturing project funded by the Korea government. Since the outcomes by utilizing each hub system are evaluated to be very beneficial for increasing competition power of Korean small and medium size companies. the Korea government will launch more bigger project. referred to as "i-Manufacturing project" which include nor only e-Manufacturing as a title of "innovation by informatization" but manufacturing processes and systems. In this paper, therefore. we briefly introduce the outline of the e-Manufacturing project and the strategy of i-Manufacturing project with the outcomes of the e-Manufacturing project in 2006 as well.