Integrated Manufacturing Information System (IMIS) for sustainable innovations: Case study of Japanese firms

This article aims to present Integrated Manufacturing Information System (IMIS) that fulfills multiple objectives simultaneously in the form of timely responses to the customer specific requests, design capabilities for products with high customer value, and excellent translation competence of embedded tacit knowledge into explicit applicable system knowledge. For this goal, this new IMIS should be able to evaluate entire business strategy based on internal product development information data base. We further provide an architecture analysis framework as a specific IMIS implementation tool and two relevant case studies are included for illustration purpose.