Collaborative design and manufacturing process planning in tooling industry

Manufacturing process planning plays a significant role by providing collaborative integration capabilities, from design to manufacturing. This situation is more acute in the tooling production industry, which is characterised by short lead-time and frequent dynamic customer requirements. A framework for collaborative integration between computerised design and manufacturing has been developed to support the integration of product design with manufacturing process planning. A prototype system based on this framework has been developed and tested in a tooling job shop with satisfactory results. The integration framework is also expected to be effectively applied in other similar enterprise application domains.