Manufacturing in the Knowledge Economy

Manufacturing as a process of fabrication is normally considered part of the industrial sector of the economy and not part of the post-industrial, or knowledge, sector. However, the knowledge economy is critically dependent on modern manufacturing technology for its existence, and modern manufacturing has come into being as a result of developments in information technologies. This presentation analyzes manufacturing as a knowledge science in which ‘knowledge’ is applied to raw materials or components to produce a product, and in which, increasingly, the knowledge is itself subject to automatic processing. This formulation allows the science of manufacturing to be extended to encompass corporate, market and socioeconomic issues within a unified framework. It also leads to an analysis of the significance for manufacturing of the knowledge level in software engineering and, in particular, of the impact of the conceptual control of information, its communication and processing through object oriented methodologies. Finally, in terms of future perspectives, the impact and importance of adopting a manufacturing ethos in the overall development of the knowledge sector, and general human knowledge processes, are highlighted.