Serious business amid the surfers

摘要

Much of the work on Internet-enabled manufacturing has been to do with using intranets as an extra internal resource - a central pond in which to float ideas, sink vast amounts of data and fish for concepts and linkages. But work in the US indicates that a big Internet role will be transferring material, including data-heavy 3D designs, up and down the supply chain, to allow simultaneous engineering and shorten product development time.