Managing engineering and technology with better interoperability in smart organizations

Furniture sector in Europe involves mainly to small and medium enterprises that try to succeed day by day in a market that is becoming more and more competitive everyday. The needs of the global economy have encouraged the furniture industry sector to use secure electronic commerce services. However, typically each of these companies uses different software to design, produce and sell their final product. A more competitive method of exchanging product data with higher quality and with low cost is foreseen, has been proposed inside IMS SMART-fm project (www.ims.org, www.smart-fm.funstep.org), leading to the need for adoption of data standards. Involving partners from USA, Europe, Canada and Australia, this project develops and demonstrates in industrial environments, an interoperable open standards-based framework that supports smart environments through the complete product life cycle in the furniture manufacturing industry. This framework supports a two level approach to business-to-business electronic commerce: 1) interoperability among user applications, and 2) interoperability among electronic commerce platforms. The paper presents the strategic objectives and results as a case study to stimulate and accelerate enterprises to adopt technologies and practices in the emerging networked digital economy. It concludes anticipating the strategic results that it will deliver for the next decade.