Small and medium enterprises play an essential and important role in economic development and social development in any country. Small and medium enterprises are found in every economy, both advanced industrialized and developing countries. In every economy there are only a few large enterprises, supported by a large number of small and medium enterprises, which explains why 90 % of enterprises...

The Virtual Organizations paradigm is gaining a growing importance in manufacturing as an instrument to help companies face the challenges of fast evolving market conditions. In this context an overview of current trends in areas such as virtual enterprises, industry clusters, virtual communities, remote supervision and virtual laboratories, and required infrastructures is presented. Fast shop-...

This paper is, centering on the requirement of the modern shipbuilding mode, to study on the project of digital comprehensive capability platform for shipbuilding. The purpose was to realize high integration and collaboration among the functions of design, manufacturing and management in shipbuilding enterprises, and form a high collaborated industry chain with its suppliers and client-industri...

Cooperation between manufacturing enterprises has recently become widespread in order to cope with newly emerged challenges, such as growing customer expectations, increasing product variety and decreasing product lifecycles. Nowadays the response to these challenges seems to be the formation of tight relations in supply chains and networks, which enables joint handling of market risks and invo...

The contradiction between economic development and environmental deterioration makes people begin to have a further understanding of the ecology and environment. To promote effective development of reverse logistics and implementation, according to general activity process of manufacturing enterprises, this paper builds the manufacturing system model of reverse logistics. On the basis of activi...

Human capital attainment among workers plays an important role in determining firm’s output and labor productivity, hence enhances firm’s competitiveness. More educated workers are believed to be more efficient and productive, reduce cost of production and raise the capability of firms to compete especially in the global market.. The intention of the Malaysian government to create the Bumiputer...

The capacity of small manufacturing firms to maintain reliable and continuously improving manufacturing processes appears to be a key condition for ensuring long-term sustainability. Governments have been very active in helping them tackle this challenge, in particular by supporting the adoption of world-class manufacturing practices. Despite the many benefits of this support, its application i...

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) is a new-generation, centrally-managed, service-oriented networked manufacturing model that can provide manufacturing resources and services to users in different locations (Wu et al. 2013b; Archimede et al. 2014). Cloud computing enthusiasts have advocated CMfg as a direct extension of cloud computing in the manufacturing sector, but the full application of cloud com...

Enterprise Information Systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, have been applied to integrate business processes within a global manufacturing enterprise. Recently, the interorganizational systems are applied to assist in business data sharing and collaboration among enterprises based on the ERP application. However, their resource requirements and failure rates are high, a...