The business environment throughout the world is currently going through rapid and far reaching change. They are analysing their business processes and scrutinising ways to make their systems more streamlined and competitive in order to meet the challenges posed by the Global Economy. Forming close alliances and integrating the operational processes with the key suppliers and customers is the mantra every one is embodying. In parallel and to support this shift in strategic focus developers are putting forward new concepts in the emerging Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to make the integration of processes among collaborating enterprises as seamless and secure as possible. Together these developments have yielded a tremendous amount of new knowledge and will continue to offer us new challenges and opportunities well into the future. This book brings together the opinions of a number of leading experts, analysts, academics, researchers, vendors and industrial practitioners from around the world who have worked extensively in the area of collaborative manufacturing. Through individual chapters in this book, authors put forward their views, approaches and new tools. Still, other authors present a glimpse of the nature of solutions that may be developed in the near future. This book is loosely structured to allow chapters which address common themes to be grouped together. In these chapters, the reader will learn aU the key issues currently being addressed in production management research and practice throughout the world.

Just as no man is an island, so no business can operate without being part of a network of businesses proactively collaborating and sharing information for mutual success. This book presents some of the latest thinking on collaborative systems by leading experts in the field.