Framework of integrated system for the innovation of mold manufacturing through process integration and collaboration

The mold industry can be characterized as small businesses which hold only less than 10 to 20 people in most countries. A medium-size mold company has cooperated with its small suppliers to overcome this situation and to finish mold manufacturing processes from order to delivery. However, the collaboration in the mold value chain has not been preformed well because of the lack of the management transparency and manufacturing history, off-line communication of manufacturing information, etc. This study proposes a framework of the integrated system which can realize the concept of a mold value chain consisted of a medium mold company and its suppliers on the Internet. First of all, the current manufacturing process performed in the extended enterprise is analyzed using BPMN (business process modeling notation). The user requirements are collected by the interview with shop floor mangers and workers, and the major system functions are extracted from these requirements using KJ method. This study proposes the PPR (product/process/resource)-based architecture of the master data which plays a key role in the integrated database and the system framework consisted of six sub-systems. Finally, this study implements its prototype to check the validity of the system framework.