Globalization of Manufacturing in the Digital Communications Era of the 21st Century: Innovation, Agility, and the Virtual Enterprise

This text aims to expand design and manufacturing issues to include teams and virtual enterprises which come together across space and time to develop new products and bring them to global markets. Manufacturing issues and information models have long been part of concurrent engineering and this book addresses the importance of new product innovation and the development of manufacturing plans and processes which span multiple countries and reach businesses on an international level. The fields covered in the book include: telecommunication use in industry for agility and innovation; human and machine communications; telecommunication and agility impact on software technology for discrete manufacturing; and software engineering. This book should be of interest to researchers, engineers and technical managers involved in the development of advanced applications for engineering and manufacturing.