Title: Collaboration Technologies for Global Manufacturing

Abstract: The globalization of manufacturing will have an impact on product and process engineering, manufacturing operations, and research. One impact is the growing requirement for teams that are not co-located to share information. They collaborate to make engineering and management decisions, to design products and processes, to trouble shoot manufacturing processes, and to accomplish advanced research. In this paper, we discuss our approach to instituting and assessing collaboration technologies for manufacturing applications. We focus on research in implementing and assessing the use and impact of collaboration technologies in a process engineering collaboration scenario. We present two approaches to collaboration technology deployment, seeding and accelerated deployment, aimed at reducing deployment costs in the manufacturing environment. Ultimately, the work presented here, in addition to similar systematic deployment and assessment of collaboration tools in other manufacturing scenarios, will provide knowledge that is useful for manufacturers who wish to effectively use and efficiently deploy collaboration technologies.