Concurrent Design to Manufacturing Collaboration for Tooling Industry

In pursuit of the most competitive advantages in modern dynamic business environment, companies have recognized the importance of the real-time integrated collaboration of the different enterprise application systems. 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 characterized by short lead-time and frequent dynamic customer requirements. A framework for concurrent design to manufacturing collaboration 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. Although the concurrent design to manufacturing collaboration framework has been developed for solving tooling production problems, it is generic and can be effectively applied in other production domains that require the support of collaborative integration.Copyright © 2005 by ASME