INTEROPERABILITY BEST PRACTICES: ADVICE FROM THE REAL-WORLD

摘要

Studies have suggested that the cost to the manufacturing industry of problems in sharing engineering data could be ￡10 Billion per year in the worldwide automobile industry alone. Few single issues present a more formidable impediment to accelerating product time-to-market. Large companies have implemented significant procedures, tools and infrastructures to try to alleviate the huge impact of these problems. Smaller companies, generally unable to afford such sophisticated tools, have little more than brute force methods to address their problems as pressure builds to further cut costs in their operations. This article presents the results of research that investigated interoperability best practices at 50 small to medium discrete manufacturers, to better understand what works and what doesn't work for manufacturers that build products on a local or multi-national level.