Title: Part I - Towards an OPIM system: manufacturing SME organisation for the future

Authors: Goran D. Putnik

Addresses: University of Minho, Department for Production and Systems Engineering, Azurem, 4800 Guimaraes, Portugal

Abstract: One Product Integrated Manufacturing (OPIM) is a new organisational concept for enterprises, which is proposed with the objective to satisfy a number of functional requirements for the future enterprise|s organisation (for example, requirements for competitiveness, flexibility, quality, efficiency, etc.). The OPIM system is an optimised manufacturing/ production system for the purpose of single product manufacturing/ production, synthesised over a universal set of primitive resources with a real-time substitutable physical structure where one instantaneous physical structure exists no longer than the lifetime of the product. Metaphorically, the OPIM system is characterised by the factory flow through a product. This is the inverse model of the traditional factory/enterprise paradigm. The OPIM system belongs to the wider concept of the Virtual Enterprise (VE) concept and it is a special case of a VE. In the first part of the paper, functional requirements for the new generation of manufacturing systems are given. The second part of the paper gives the OPIM concept definition and in the third part the applicability analysis is presented. In the fourth part of the paper, implementation issues are discussed.

Keywords: One Product Integrated Manufacturing (OPIM); virtual enterprise; OPIM institutionalisation; virtual enterprise institutionalisation; global manufacturing; telematics technologies; manufacturing SMEs; organisation; factory models flow through product.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2002.002542

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2002 Vol.1 No.2, pp.125-150

Published online: 23 Jul 2003 *

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