THE DESIGN OF COMPUTER-INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) offers a number of useful and potential opportunities for improving the system performance of the ma nufacturing firm. However, it has been reported that there is always d ifficulty while implementing CIM due to lack of integration between va rious functional areas of manufacturing such as sales, research and de velopment, design and engineering, production planning and control, di stribution in terms of both material and information flows. This may b e due to the design problems of CIM. Realizing the importance of CIM b oth from the investment and operational efficiency points of view, an attempt has been made in this paper to investigate and design and impl ementation issues of CIM. The purpose of this paper is to: (i) review the design and implementation approaches from a strategic point of vie w, (ii) identify the gap between theory and practice in the design and implementation approaches of CIM, (iii) suggest a suitable framework for the design and implementation of CIM with a view to improve produc tivity and quality and (iv) suggest future research directions in the development of CIM.