VIRTUAL MANUFACTURING: AN IMPORTANT ASPECT OF COLLABORATIVE PRODUCT COMMERCE

Abstract

The sweeping changes in the web-related technologies in the late 1990s have brought paradigm shift in the business environment and strategic thinking of the organizations. To remain competitive in this ever-changing business scenario, the organizations are focusing more and more on the globalization of businesses and collaboration in the product development across the value chain. This phenomenon has given rise to a new business concept — Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC) that applies web-related technologies for the integration of various value-chain constituents from suppliers to customers. It focuses on cross-enterprise teams to share the intellectual capital in real time to reduce the time-to-market in the product development life cycle. Manufacturing is the central activity that encompasses product, process, resources and plant. Manufacturing activities across the enterprises with real time exchange of information result in the optimization of design, resources and processes, which is in the true spirit of collaborative product commerce. One of the most important facilitators of the collaborative aspects of manufacturing is the virtualization of the manufacturing process components. It involves various visualization and data integration aspects. To deliver value added solutions in this area, it is imperative to have thorough expertise in the engineering services. The focus of this paper will be on virtualization aspects of manufacturing in a collaborative environment. Important paradigms of virtual manufacturing such as design-centered, production-centered and control-centered virtualization will be first discussed in brief. Virtualization of important components of manufacturing such as process planning and design, equipment designs and factory layout and resource management will be discussed in details. To conclude, significance of virtualization of manufacturing in terms of business benefits in the collaborative product development environment will be considered.