An Overview Of A Manufacturing Enterprise

By Author: endeavor su
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For most enterprises, the long-term goal is to stay in business, grow, and make a profit.

This is particularly true to manufacturing enterprises, which must understand the dynamic changes that are taking place in the business environment.

The twenty-first century business environment can be characterized by expanding global competition and products of increasing variety and lower demand. The globalization of economic activity has brought about a sea change in the attitudes of customers.

Customer individualism is certain to become the central theme of business. What we are going to witness is an era of mass customization. This means manufacturing products for the mass market in such a way that products are customized for each individual in that market.

Recall that in the 1970s, the cost of products was the main lever for obtaining competitive advantage. Later in the 1980s, quality superseded cost and became an important competitive dimension. Now low unit cost and high quality of products no longer solely define competitive advantage. Today, the customer takes both minimum ...
... cost and high quality for granted.

Factors such as delivery performance and customization and environmental issues such as waste generation are assuming a predominant role in defining the success of organizations in terms of increased market share and profitability. The question is, what can we do under these changing circumstances to stay in business and retain competitive advantages?

As a first step what is needed is the development of the right business strategy to meet the challenges of present and future markets. In doing so, a manufacturing organization has not only to understand what customers want but also to develop internal mechanisms to respond instantly to the changes demanded by customers.

This requires a paradigm shift in everything our factories do. They must not only make use of state-of-the-art technologies and concepts but also think in the reverse direction. "Reverse direction" means building products that realize customer expectations.

That is, when an organization is deciding about business plans, it has to address several questions. Will the customer find any change in what one does as a result of using this? Will the customer be able to define any benefit?

From the customer's point of view, a company has to respond to smaller and smaller market niches quickly with standardized products that will be built in lower and lower volume. In other words, we can say that a future successful manufacturing organization will be a virtual corporation that is instantaneously responsive to customer needs.

This view has been shared by an industry-led consortium on twenty-first century manufacturing enterprise strategy.The next step is to determine the right kind of resources to support the business strategy.

This requires the right choice of people, technology, and business processes. What is further needed is a marriage of corporate strategies, technology, people, and business processes with a view to evolving policies so that all the functional organs of an organization (finance, sales and marketing, product engineering, manufacturing, and human resources) work in a synchronized manner to achieve corporate objectives.

The obvious question then is, how should a manufacturing enterprise work?We know that all the functional organs of a manufacturing enterprise, such as finance, sales and marketing, design and manufacturing, and human resources, continually receive feedback about products, product attributes, and market segments. Fig. 1. 1 shows how customers play a pivotal role in defining the manufacturing enterprise.

Corporate objectives such as growth in market share, profitability, work force stability, and other financial measures essentially emanate from the understanding of the marketplace. For example, marketing identifies a range of products, design and manufacturing plan is built considering such aspects as product and process definition, manufacturing planning and control, and factory automation.

Integration of a complete enterprise would facilitate successful implementation of these plans in realizing the corporate goals. Information resource management, communications, and a common database are required for the integration of a complete enterprise.

As discussed earlier in this section, mass customization with high delivery performance, high quality, low cost, and environmentally conscious products is required for a manufacturing organization to remain successful in the twenty-first century.

To support such a virtual organization for discrete products manufacturing, a thorough understanding of the concepts and technologies for the design and manufacturing of products is necessary.

Although the understanding of functional areas such as marketing, finance, and personnel is also important for the successful operation of a manufacturing enterprise, the scope of this book is limited to two major functional areas: design and manufacturing. Accordingly, this book provides a systems approach to understanding the concepts and technologies in computer integrated design and manufacturing systems.

In later chapters we will discuss computer aided design (CAD), concurrent engineering (CE), computer aided process planning (CAPP), computer aided manufacturing (CAM), quality engineering, automated material handling, robotics, manufacturing planning and control, cellular manufacturing, just-in-time manufacturing (JIT), flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), and enterprise integration. Before starting our journey of understanding of these concepts and technologies, let us have a look at the recent past; it will be beneficial in placing and judging things in the right perspective.

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