The concept (and implementation) of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has drawn much attention in both industry and academia. This paper investigates the scope of PLM systems, presents different types of PLM architecture and identifies an appropriate definition of PLM for a Network-Centric Manufacturing paradigm with a specific focus on small manufacturing enterprises. Research issues of PLM s...

This paper discusses a framework to optimise manufacturing processes for small to medium enterprises through the application of ambient intelligent technologies. To profit in today’s market, small manufacturers must be efficient and agile to minimise cost and to meet variable market demand. Smart tags, agent technology, multi-modal communication, semantic reasoning technology and contextaware a...

Lean manufacturing is an important aspect used by the current companies to compete in the market. The high cost of production in many sectors has forced companies to offer their products at high prices thus failing to attract customers. Small and medium sized enterprises in Indian electronic and electrical industry face high competition challenges from international companies thus, application ...

This article aims to explore the effects of the use of an ERP system in a manufacturing company on strategy development as described by defined factors. The work is based on a survey and data obtained from 62 Polish manufacturing enterprises from the Lubuskie region, and from 23 German manufacturing enterprises from the Brandenburg region, in which the companies were categorised as either “cons...

The market globalization and increase of competition forces manufacturing companies to adopt new business organization paradigms. Moreover, Small and Medium Enterprises can compete to a global level if they try to cooperate at different levels as: design, production planning, et cetera. Figure 1 shows the driving forces towards the adoption of cooperation mechanism for the Small and Medium Ente...

Today’s complex manufacturing systems operate in a changing environment rife with uncertainty. The performance of manufacturing companies ultimately hinges on their ability to rapidly adapt production to current internal and external circumstances. Partly based on a running national research project on digital enterprises and production networks, the paper illustrates how the concepts of intell...

Today’s complex manufacturing systems operate in a changing environment rife with uncertainty. The performance of manufacturing companies ultimately hinges on their ability to rapidly adapt their production to current internal and external circumstances. Partly based on a running national research project on digital enterprises and production networks, the paper illustrates how the concepts of ...

for the past 3 decades, creating industrial clusters have been considered as an approach for the development of most small and medium enterprises. the goal of this programme is that all small and medium enterprises locating in a certain geoghraphic area can concentrate on cluster approach to collaborate in market research, production design, training and other activities that are not economical...