A Manufacturing Engineering Perspective on Supply Chain Integration

Supply chain integration is an area that has recently generated a great deal of interests in the manufacturing research community. Supply chain research can be traced back to just before the 1960’s. Increased study of the field began in the 1980’s, with a dramatic increase in the publication rate since 1990. However, most of the research works reported in the literature have a strong business management and operations research emphasis. The role of manufacturing engineers in supply chain integration was somewhat overlooked. In this paper, a manufacturing engineering perspective on supply chain integration is presented. Research issues discussed include (1) product and process design for supply chain, (2) design and evaluation of manufacturing supply chain, (3) agent-based techniques for supply chain integration, (4) intelligent information sharing across supply chain, and (5) development of standards for product, process, and production data exchange to facilitate electronic commerce. The objective is to provide guidelines and references for manufacturing engineers and researchers that are interested in supply chain integration.