Industrial Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Industrial small and medium (SME) manufacturing companies face complex and challenging market conditions that may impact their organization and economic strength. In fact, for a manufacturing SME to remain competitive in the global economy, it must cope with the following basic characteristics of the market:

• Global competition — actual companies compete on a global scale and with products from all over the world, i.e., coming from very different economic realities in terms of organization, labor, social protection and security, etc. Their competitors are global companies that address the markets with specific objectives and strategies, making the competition very unpredictable.

• Demand for more quality at lower prices — customers want the continuous improvement of quality at lower prices, i.e., customers tend to evaluate the quality of the product/service obtained for the money spent in buying it. This puts big pressure on companies since the market offers other options for the same product or service, and customers are used to making comparisons using the quality/price ratio.

• Very complex products — many of the modern high-technology products are very complex to manufacture since they often are composed of many mechanical parts, electronic components, software modules, etc. This poses new challenges to manufacturing systems.

• Very short life-cycles and time-to-market periods — competition and continuous innovation tends to reduce the life-cycle of products, forcing companies to evolve their line of products more often and with higher levels of agility.