The drive to reduce costs and enhance competitiveness in manufacturing industry has led to greatly increased interest in industrial automation, particularly for small and medium sized enterprises. Although manufacturing robots and flexible machining systems (FMS) are no longer the exclusive preserve of the major industrial multi-nationals, their adoption has not been as widespread or as effective as was once predicted. The purpose of this book is to examine the international patterns of development and adoption of flexible automated manufacturing, to identify current and future best practice particularly in the emerging technology of robotic assembly, and to show how technology, industrial flexibility and competitiveness are inter-related.

Innovations in Competitive Manufacturing is an examination of manufacturing innovations - both technical and knowledge-based. Over the recent past, technology has created dramatic changes in manufacturing. As a result, the book focuses on the use of technology in gaining competitive advantage in global manufacturing. Forty topics are surveyed in the book, organized into thirteen chapters. Each topic is a carefully written account by one or more leading researchers in that area. This is the first systematic examination of the recent innovations in manufacturing strategy and technology. In addition to providing an understanding of these manufacturing innovations, the book underscores the strategic importance of creating and sustaining the technological resources to ensure a stable manufacturing economic base. The book's purpose is to examine the elements that make today's manufacturers successful. Many examples from industry throughout the book will enable the reader to appreciate and comprehend the concepts presented in the article. In addition to the technical and innovative information, implementation issues concerning new ideas and manufacturing practices are explored within the topical discussions. Four in-depth descriptions of real-life cases provide illustration of key principles. The book has been constructed as a reference tool for manufacturing researchers, students, and practitioners. Hence, after reading the introduction `Innovation in Competitive Manufacturing: From JIT to E-Business', any section or topic in the book can be consulted and/or read in any sequence the reader may choose.

Stuart A. Rosenfeld presents a timely analysis of the problems the United States and other industrialized countries face as they adjust from economies based on natural resources and goods to economies based on quality of human resources and high-performance, market-oriented organizations. Some of the questions raised include: Will American industry successfully face the competitive challenge of the global economy? Can US manufacturing raise productivity and innovate enough to remain healthy? Have the latest advances in process technology and management practice penetrated the rural industrial base? How can public policy help improve the competitiveness of the crucial manufacturing sector? This book challenges the conventional wisdom in economic development policy. Past state and local industrial policy focused on locational decisions, not on issues of competitiveness. Building the competitive advantage of industry is more important than promoting the competitive advantages of location. Incentives to modernize are more important than subsidies to locate. Competitive Manufacturing uses the rural South, the most industrialized rural region of the nation, to examine the strengths and weaknesses of manufacturing as the basis for economic growth. Using historical analysis, surveys, and intensive case studies, the author analyzes the technological capabilities of rural manufacturing, the factors that influence the decision to modernize, and the effects of technology on education and work. Comparative studies in Denmark and Italy point to new directions for US economic development policy.

“Changeable and Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems” discusses key strategies for success in the changing manufacturing environment. Changes can often be anticipated but some go beyond the design range, requiring innovative change enablers and adaptation mechanisms. The book presents the new concept of Changeability as an umbrella framework that encompasses paradigms such as agility, adaptability, flexibility and reconfigurability. It provides the definitions and classification of key terms in this new field, and emphasizes the required physical/hard and logical/soft change enablers. The book presents cutting edge technologies and the latest research, as well as future directions to help manufacturers stay competitive. It contains original contributions and results from senior international experts, together with industrial applications. The book serves as a comprehensive reference for professional engineers, managers, and academics in manufacturing, industrial and mechanical engineering.

Manufacturers worldwide are faced with unprecedented challenges from international competition, changing production processes and technologies, shorter production life-cycles, market globalization and environmental requirements. Fundamental to meeting these challenges is the understanding and control of information across all stages of the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) process. Modern Manufacturing presents the state of the art in the information-oriented aspects of CIM and Intelligent Manufacturing Systems. Particular emphasis is placed on the impact of new software engineering technologies, the object-oriented approach, database design, hierarchical control and intelligent systems. The contributions are written by experts from Europe and the USA.

Marcela Miozzo is Reader in Innovation Studies at Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, UK. Her teaching and research activities are the innovation and the internationalization of services; technological and organisational changes in the construction sector; and technological capabilities of firms in Latin America. Vivien Walsh is Professor of Innovation Management at Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, UK. Her teaching and research activities are the areas of globalization; networks and collaboration in the innovation process.

In the last decade, the production of mechanical components to be assembled in final products produced in high volumes (e.g. cars, mopeds, industrial vehicles, etc.) has undergone deep changes due to the overall modifications in the way companies compete. Companies must consider competitive factors such as short lead times, tight product tolerances, frequent market changes and cost reduction. Anyway, companies often have to define production objectives as trade-offs among these critical factors since it can be difficult to improve all of them. Even if system flexibility is often considered a fundamental requirement for firms, it is not always a desirable characteristic of a system because it requires relevant investment cost which can jeopardize the profitability of the firm. Dedicated systems are not able to adapt to changes of the product characteristics while flexible systems offer more flexibility than what is needed, thus increasing investment and operative costs. Production contexts characterized by mid to high demand volume of well identified families of products in continuous evolution do not require the highest level of flexibility; therefore, manufacturing system flexibility must be rationalized and it is necessary to find out the best trade-off between productivity and flexibility by designing manufacturing systems endowed with the right level of flexibility required by the production problem. This new class of production systems can be named Focused Flexibility Manufacturing Systems-FFMSs. The flexibility degree in FFMSs is related to their ability to cope with volume, mix and technological changes, and it must take into account both present and future changes. The required level of system flexibility impacts on the architecture of the system and the explicit design of flexibility often leads to hybrid systems, i.e. automated integrated systems in which parts can be processed by both general purpose and dedicated machines. This is a key issue of FFMSs and results from the matching of flexibility and productivity that respectively characterize FMSs and Dedicated Manufacturing Systems (DMSs). The market share of the EU in the machine tool sector is 44%; the introduction of focused flexibility would be particularly important for machine tool builders whose competitive advantage is based on the ability of customizing their systems on the basis of needs of their customers. In fact, even if current production contexts frequently present situations which would fit well with the FFMS approach, tradition and know-how of machine tool builders play a crucial role. Firms often agree with the focused flexibility vision, nevertheless they decide not to pay the risk and efforts related to the design of this new system architecture. This is due also to the lack of well-structured design approaches which can help machine tool builders to configure innovative systems. Therefore, the FFMS topic is studied through the book chapters following a shared mission: "To define methodologies and tools to design production systems with a minimum level of flexibility needed to face, during their lifecycle, the product and process evolution both in the technological and demand aspects. The goal is to find out the optimal trade-off between flexibility and productivity". The book framework follows the architecture which has been developed to address the FFMS Design problem. This architecture is both broad and detailed, since it pays attention to all the relevant levels in a firm hierarchy which are involved in the system design. Moreover, the architecture is innovative because it models both the point of view of the machine tool builder and the point of view of the system user. The architecture starts analyzing Manufacturing Strategy issues and generating the possible demand scenario to be faced. Technological aspects play a key role while solving process plan problems for the products in the part family. Strategic and technological data becomes input when a machine tool builder performs system configuration. The resulting system configurations are possible solutions that a system user considers when planning its system capacity. All the steps of the architecture are deeply studied, developing methods and tools to address each subproblem. Particular attention is paid to the methodologies adopted to face the different subproblems: mathematical programming, stochastic programming, simulation techniques and inverse kinematics have been used. The whole architecture provides a general approach to implement the right degree of flexibility and it allows to study how different aspects and decisions taken in a firm impact on each other. The work presented in the book is innovative because it gives links among different research fields, such as Manufacturing Strategy, Process Plan, System Design, Capacity Planning and Performance Evaluation; moreover, it helps to formalize and rationalize a critical area such as manufacturing system flexibility. The addressed problem is relevant at an academic level but, also, at an industrial level. A great deal of industrial sectors need to address the problem of designing systems with the right degree of flexibility; for instance, automotive, white goods, electrical and electronic goods industries, etc. Attention to industrial issues is confirmed by empirical studies and real case analyses which are presented within the book chapters.