eServices for Traditional Manufacturing: Social Media for Collaborative Casting Development

摘要

Firms collaborate in supply chains to achieve mutual objectives by sharing information and heading for greater success than would be possible acting independently. In today's collaborative environment the realtime interaction is needed and social media gives new possibilities for such communication. The aim of the paper is to describe the expectations towards using social media in improving product development business processes in casting industry. We used a simulation game to test the expectations towards using social media. The idea of the simulation game was to simulate the new product development process of a customer and a supplier. Three case studies were conducted to collect the background data and one firm that use castings as components in its products was selected to play the simulation game with the foundry. In the simulation game we used a web forum tool which included three different discussion forums for different purposes. The players of the simulation game gave positive feedback relating social media supported collaboration practices. The results that are based on the players' opinions indicate that utilizing social media in trans-organizational new product development project at the early phase can help in supplier selection,can make the design process faster,and can improve the manufacturability of the cast components. Additionally,the players mentioned that new collaboration practices and social media tools that were used in the simulation game could help them,for example,rinding better solutions than before and achieving more real-time interaction compared to old practices and tools.