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We examine Hong Kong's role in the modernization of manufacturing industries in Mainland China and its province of Guangdong. Hong Kong's role has evolved from trading intermediary to low-cost mainland manufacturer to provider of key business, financial, and supply chain services.

Statistical process control (SPC) for manufacturing processes has been a well-established and indispensable tool for producing tangible products consistently. With the continuing trend of servitization, most service processes, however, require highly dynamic process behavior to satisfy individual customers. Conventional process control, without the facility to consider the process context, has hence not been capable to adequately control such processes in response to respective needs. This paper addresses this issue, firstly, by considering the dependence of the process from its context explicitly and, secondly, by utilizing stochastic frontier analysis to determine context-dependent control targets. A simple case study shows promising results for achieving a consistent process control under today's widely dynamic environments. (C) 2016 CIRP.

Current developments in globalized markets lead to an increasing need for flexible and agile production systems. Especially within automated assembly stations, the human worker still embodies a major role, essentially his adaptability and his problem solving skills in unplanned scenarios, that need to be coordinated in an efficient and safe way. Nevertheless, the physical human safety within human-robot coexistence represents the key requirement for system productivity and acceptance. Along with an optimized deployment of both robotic and human skills, workspace sharing concepts based on human-robot-coexistence enable ergonomic workload distributions. As a result, the establishment of human-centered workplaces is facilitated. This paper presents a framework and major design principles for workspace-sharing concepts incorporating task identification and coordination aspects for assembly systems. The methodology introduced comprises a generic requirement analysis and functional specifications that lead to a generalized solutions space based on a probabilistic multi-agent-system that catches the intricate system interferences between process, product and human worker. © 2015 IEEE.

Scheduling has long been a challenge to housing construction industry. It is critical to find a dynamic resource allocation mechanism that can fit into the intrinsically distributed subcontracting project and react to highly dynamic real-time event from construction site. An agent based scheduling mechanism is proposed at operation level to address the distributed decision making structure in housing construction context. An auction based negotiation protocol is presented to facilitate coordination among distributed scheduling agents. The proposed mechanism has been evaluated favorably in terms of load balancing and resource utilization under dynamically changing environment. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Global manufacturing has extended the supply chain not only in span of networks and dispersion of geographical locations but also more importantly, it also transcends vast organizational boundaries among webs of long supply chains. Naturally, the information and computation technology (ICT) systems supporting these entities serve well on their own merits independently; however, the sharing of information among them in a responsive and agile and secure fashion is limited. The advent of cloud computing provides a distinct possibility to enhance sharing of information, to better apply modern analytic tools and to improve managing the controlled access as well as security. This paper is prepared to address the architectural issues of the data, analytics, and organizational layers. Copyright © 2015 by ASME.

The objective of a spare part support operation is to fulfill the part request order with different service contracts in the agreed response time. With this objective to achieve different service targets for multiple service contracts and the considerations of inventory investment, it is not only important to determine the inventory policy but also to design the structure of inventory pools and the order fulfilment strategies. In this research, we focused on two types of inventory pools: multiple inventory pool (MIP) and consolidated inventory pool (CIP). The idea of MIP is to maintain separated inventory pools based on the types of service contract, while CIP solely maintains a single inventory pool regardless of service contract. Our research aims to design the inventory pool analytically and propose reserve strategies to manage the order fulfilment risks in CIP. Mathematical models and simulation experiments would be applied for analysis and evaluation.

Rapid changes of new technologies, market dynamics, and swift fluctuation of customer tastes acerbate the needs for companies to identifying the emerging customer requirements and incorporate them in the conceptual design stage. Discovering emerging customer needs has great potential to create new product opportunities for the success of business. However, identifying customers' requirements in an early design stage has not been well addressed in the traditional design methodology. Because emerging needs are usually not obvious at the budding stage, the related observations are rare in dataset. Traditional methods fall short of providing enough support of eliciting the below-the-radar needs. This paper reports a new approach to identify emerging customer needs in the growing popular online interactive environment with customer participation. The Bayes factor, a methodology to quantify the occurrence possibility of a certain event, is used to calculate the likelihood that current offering cannot meet the customer's requirements whenever a new specification is incorporated. With the sequential input from customers, a series of the Bayes factor value can then be calculated as the weight of evidence that emerging customer needs appear. We show that the decreased value will be the potentially emerging needs which cannot be satisfied by the current product family. Numerical and analytical results are derived to demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

A great challenge facing industry today is managing variety throughout the entire products life cycle. Drivers of products variety, its benefits, pre-requisites and associated complexity and cost are presented. Enhancing consumers' value through variety and approaches for achieving it efficiently including modularity, commonality and differentiation are discussed. Variant-oriented manufacturing systems paradigms, as enablers of product variety, and the effective co-development of variants and their manufacturing systems to ensure economic sustainability are reviewed. Industrial applications and guidelines to achieve economy of scope with advantages of economy of scale are discussed. Perspectives and insights on future research in this field are offered. (C) 2013 CIRP.

To focus a company's value-adding activities on its core competencies is propagated as a means to deliver products on-time at competitive prices and with high quality. When pursuing a mass customization strategy, defining the value chain setup through make-or-buy decisions is challenging. Traditional outsourcing operational options are undermined by the high number of product variants, small number of sales and fast product changeovers. This paper aims at creating a methodology to support companies when deciding which activities should be kept in-house or be outsourced. The paper proposes a method based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process where the make-or-buy decision is based on criteria related to quality, cost and delivery time. The fulfillment domains design, fabrication, assembly, warehousing, distribution and retail are also taken into account. The methodology is illustrated in a case study from the apparel contract manufacturing sector.

Open source software has achieved acceptable success since its emergence in early 1980s. The open concept model soon drew public attention and researchers started to explore the approach to extend the model from software to the non-software field. This paper studies several cases of open source software, open innovation and open manufacturing, to qualitatively investigate how the open model works under different scenarios: initially in a pure immaterial field of open source software, then as an immaterial part of coupled immaterial and material flows of co-design in open innovation, and finally in synchronized immaterial and material flows of open manufacturing. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.