IT support for product and process development in Japan and future perspective

Abstract

Due to the globalization of market and manufacturing activity, manufacturing industry in industrially advanced countries are facing difficult problems, such as severe competition with the low-cost production in developing countries and radical changes of customer requirements in industrially mature countries, etc. For coping with these problems, it is important to identify hidden or potential customer expectation, and to develop systematized design and manufacturing technology to augment human expertise for innovative product development. It is known that the strength of Japanese manufacturing industry comes from the intimate integration of sophisticated human expertise and highly efficient production capability. For keeping the competitiveness of the Japanese industry, it is strongly required to systematize the product and process development throughout the total product life cycle, and to introduce IT methods and tools for supporting creative and intelligent human activities and for automating well understood engineering processes. In this paper, current issues in manufacturing industry are generally reviewed. Future directions of manufacturing industry are described, and important technological issues and their IT support solutions are discussed. Finally future perspective for advanced IT support is investigated.