An Overview Of Computer Integrated Manufacturing

In today´s manufacturing environment, competition and technological advances affect both products and processes. A major management challenge will be to select the proper technologies to make the most efficient use of resources and gain a competitive advantage. Companies must quickly respond to market changes and customer demands in terms of product features, availability, and price. At the same time, costs must be kept low and quality high in design and production. These will not be achieved by technology alone. In addition to organizational changes and new management approaches, computer integrated manufacturing will play a vital role in the future of production environments. The recognition of information from the activities of many varied areas of an organization is important. These include design and manufacturing engineering, production and process planning, marketing, field service, finance, information systems, materials control, operations and distribution. The volume of data from these areas and the need for information collection, storage, and handling resulted in automation via computer technology. However, a by-product of automation is a large number of stand-alone islands incorporating computer technologies. This creates a severe problem for an enterprise because data is stored in multiple locations and changed by many different people, which results in a loss of data integrity. Transfer from one piece of equipment to another is often manual. This is inefficient and allows for many errors to result.