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.

On the verge of the global information society, enterprises are competing for markets that are becoming global and driven by customer demand, and where growing specialisation is pushing them to focus on core competencies and look for partnerships to provide products and services. Simultaneously the public demands environmentally sustainable industries and urges manufacturers to mind the whole life span of their products and production resources. Information infrastructure systems are anticipated to offer services enabling and catalyzing the strategies of manufacturing companies responding to these challenges: they support the formation of extended enterprises, the mastering of full product and process life cycles, and the digitalization of the development process. Information infrastructure systems would accommodate access to and transformation of information as required by the various authorized stakeholders involved in the life phases of products or production resources. Services should be available to select and present all relevant information for situations involving any kind of players, during any life phase of a product or artifact, at any moment and at any place.

Customer-driven manufacturing is the key concept for the factory of the future. The markets for consumer goods are nowadays marked by an increase in variety, while at the same time showing steadily decreasing product life-cycles. In addition, tailoring the product to the customer's needs is becoming increasingly important in quality improvement. These trends are resulting in production in small batches, driven by customer orders. Customer-driven Manufacturing adopts a design-oriented approach, splitting the realisation of customer-driven manufacturing into three main steps. Firstly, you must understand the primary process of your business. The second step is to analyse and re-design the management and control of the organisation. Finally, the organisation's information system must be analysed and redesigned.

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.

On the verge of the global information society, enterprises are competing for markets that are becoming global and driven by customer demand, and where growing specialisation is pushing them to focus on core competencies and look for partnerships to provide products and services. Simultaneously the public demands environmentally sustainable industries and urges manufacturers to mind the whole life span of their products and production resources. Information infrastructure systems are anticipated to offer services enabling and catalyzing the strategies of manufacturing companies responding to these challenges: they support the formation of extended enterprises, the mastering of full product and process life cycles, and the digitalization of the development process. Information infrastructure systems would accommodate access to and transformation of information as required by the various authorized stakeholders involved in the life phases of products or production resources. Services should be available to select and present all relevant information for situations involving any kind of players, during any life phase of a product or artifact, at any moment and at any place.