A methodology for product life-cycle development for global manufacturing

This paper demonstrates the framework and major objectives of the ESPRIT project 7752, IMS-GCE. The collaboration is international and the consortium members represent a cohesive group from the various regions, including companies and research institutions from the UK, USA, Canada, Italy, Denmark, and Finland. Those collaborators have been working effectively together on a comparative study of global concurrent engineering to find the best practices and major constraints, and to design an architecture for a concurrent engineering system for global manufacturing. Some of the results which show how a product can be manufactured in several countries with ease of co-ordination that results in highly efficient production and logistics are discussed