research paper

Abstract—Renewing manufacturing America is essential to economic recovery. In fact, President Obama sized up this way, “The fight for American manufacturing is a fight for America’s future.” This paper describes how to apply the service-oriented enterprise paradigm to produce service-oriented manufacturing (SOM), a developing concept that can become a catalyst for strengthening the US Manufacturing Base. The terms sound alike, including the enabling technology, service-oriented architecture (SOA) that is well entrenched in many applications. The SOM application is specific to manufacturing and addresses contemporary needs of both commercial and government customers.

Keywords— Service-oriented manufacturing (SOM); service-oriented enterprise (SOE), service-oriented architecture (SOA), accelerated art-to-part cycle, IT footprint reduction

INTRODUCTION

SOM introduces the concept of a manufacturing strategy based on a service orientation and a synergistic joint venture, consortium approach, between industry competitors, much like the Japanese Keritsu and German Koncern approaches. Our SOM approach embraces both large and small manufacturing companies.

Traditional manufacturing strategies have often been driven, top down, by cost minimization decisions and have encouraged the over-reliance, by managers, on inventories to satisfy demand. We adopt a Smart Data approach to our SOM model, in which we investigate solutions from a bottom-up, grass roots, interoperable perspective.

In today's business environment, a reliance on inventory is often not feasible. SOM suggests a reliance on capacity available to meet demand, as used by the service industry. Such a strategy is in direct conflict with most cost-accounting systems because of the absorption of overhead costs based on direct labor. Further, many small manufacturing firms cannot afford expensive ERP systems such as SAP, Caliber and Golareth, SEER. In fact they may not even have the latest versions of CAD/CAM to interpret the government’s specs.

SOM proposes two alternatives for changing the existing manufacturing system, to enhance the move toward a service-based strategy. First, we propose a Mom and Pop, operations level, bottom-up approach. Second, our model expounds a consortium of synergistic small and large firms acting together for the common good. We propose to audit cost centers across the supply chain and apply cloud computing principles in order to provide the functionality needed for rejuvenating the manufacturing sector. This will involve a SOE approach of providing a SOA that is interoperable and with the capability to control costs through the correct application of algorithms and methods.

Lastly, we make a case for developing a survey to measure the variables in a Task Technology Fit (TTF) and Technology Acceptance model (TAM) study of PA manufacturing plants, to illustrate the results that a company, adopting this approach, should expect. There are 1,700 manufacturing companies in Pennsylvania, with 200 enrolled in CCR registration. There are 7,000 subscribers for “Industry Week Magazine” which we will contact and ask both open-ended and Likert style questions concerning SOM. These results will be discussed at the DMC 2010 Conference in Las Vegas in November. More data will be collected from US manufacturing firms in other states in order to add to the generaizability of the study.