i-Manufacturing project for collaboration-based Korean manufacturing innovation

Unpredictable customer needs strongly require for manufacturing enterprises to produce quality products satisfying cost and time constraints. To cope with such dynamically changing manufacturing environment and to get higher competitiveness, the manufacturing industry needs to equip with advanced technologies including IT as well as substantial infrastructure. ldquoi-Manufacturingrdquo is the name of the project funded by the Korea government, but on the other it is the strategy for achieving manufacturing innovation in Korea. The most basic but important concept of the i-Manufacturing is ldquocollaborationrdquo. As a part of the project, we are developing various kinds of web-based collaboration systems. We applied IT into conventional manufacturing industry by developing strategic business models and collaboration systems. As a consequence, more than 300 companies are currently using 7 different collaboration systems and they are reducing manufacturing cost and delivery time while increasing product quality and profit. In this paper, therefore, we first introduce the i-Manufacturing and collaboration systems we have developed. The architecture and functions of systems will also be described in detail with case studies.