Innovative Organization, Management and New Business Models

The digital tooling factory involves the modelling, simulation and planning applications for complex production systems involving design, process and production planning and factory automation Besides the automation hardware, and the development of software, this area includes

• (1)the development /adaptation of production planning models (within the concept of lean and agile tooling production);
• (2)the development of new knowledge based engineering rules for automated (intelligent/assisted) process planning capabilities (bridging the gap between design and manufacturing and allowing the virtual manufacturing);
• (3)the development of performance evaluation systems for tooling industry (meaning new models, methods and applications to model, simulate and analyze the performance of the manufacturing system as a whole in order to support compromises between flexibility/agility and productivity in the decision making)

Traditionally tool-makers have developed a self-sufficiency culture. Globalization for SMEs can only be faced in a networking and collaborative context where cooperation exists with clients, suppliers, and other external entities with which is possible to develop complementarities, dimension gains or risk sharing. Development of Internet assisted tooling manufacturing systems and web-based engineering and management applications are required to supply global structured real-time information related to production operations and internal or external processes (logistics) to the extended manufacturing network. Distributed engineering and manufacturing if conveniently infrastructure and designed by and to the sector will be a way to achieve flexible capacity systems and provide solutions to a highly variable demand market.

Depending on the production life of the final products, tools have life cycles ranging from some weeks to several years. However, tool makers only supervise tools during their production cycle. Tools are capital goods commercialized based on price, delivery date and quality characteristics and these characteristics are not directly correlated with tools performance and cost along life cycle. The cost of the part produced by the tool and the cost of the tool over the life cycle are important decision factors in the buying process. But, life cycle costs are neither a tool design variable nor a quality/performance indicator. New knowledge, models and applications to design and produce tools considering performance objectives from the stage of initial conception to the retirement stage (Product Lifecycle Management) are needed.

From the product/part development and prototyping to the industrialization, tools maintenance and disposal (recycling, re-use,…) there are a set of new market opportunities to enlarge the typical domain of the tooling industry. Besides core business concentration, the competitive conditions ask for integrated engineering solutions within a service providing framework which requires, in a SMEs sector, new businesses models based on collaborative approaches. Research is required as regards the identification of best practices and integrated organizational/technological/knowledge business strategies. Demonstration of these best practices and strategies, based on case studies, will facilitate the systematization and dissemination of new competitive business models.