Beyond the thresholds of current manufacturing: perspectives on management, technology and organizations

This work is concerned with the analysis of the next generation of manufacturing organisations. After reviewing the literature, problem analyses have been understood and a solution design has been proposed. The authors' point of departure is that despite current efforts to add flexibility and agility to manufacturing systems, they still are a long way from being classified as "customer-centred". To be in conformance with this property, they propose that new capabilities can be embedded into the next generation of such systems. For this purpose, their task is threefold, and therefore they propose three complementary perspectives on management, technology and organizations respectively. The first is concerned with the concept of environment management, which includes the management of all classes of customers, like suppliers and stakeholders. The second is concerned with the design of intelligent systems with high degrees of machine intelligence quotient on both shop floor and management functional levels, and in particular with the capability to provide immersiveness to customers. The last perspective is concerned with organisations. Analyses of manufacturing systems from both the past and the present eras to ones of the future are introduced using the concept of hierarchical levels of complexity.