An investigation on establishing small- and medium-sized enterprises communities under the environment of social manufacturing

Abstract

Manufacturing industry has become professionalization, socialized, service-oriented, and collaborative, so lots of professional and socialized small-and medium-sized enterprises spring up to provide product-service for satisfying customers' requirements. Faced with this trend, a new manufacturing mode called social manufacturing has been proposed to aggregate these small-and medium-sized enterprises into communities for mass individualization manufacturing. As the basis of social manufacturing, small-and medium-sized enterprises communities are established by two steps. First, the socialized manufacturing resources of the small-and medium-sized enterprises are described and similar socialized manufacturing resources are clustered into one socialized manufacturing resources community by growing hierarchical selforganizing map algorithm. Suitable socialized manufacturing resources communities are selected and then the socialized manufacturing resources are mapped into small-and medium-sized enterprises. Second, these small-and medium-sized enterprises form a community to complete the order together. Product cost and delivery time serve as the indicator for order allocating in the small-and medium-sized enterprises community. A multi-objective algorithm is proposed to tackle the order allocation problem. A case from a professional printing firm is analyzed to validate the proposed methodology and model. Some rules are revealed and these rules are useful for guiding practical production. The study endorses the establishing small-and medium-sized enterprises communities under the environment of social manufacturing and suggests extensive practical implications.

Integrated Production System on Social Manufacturing: A Simulation Study

“…Social Manufacturing is a special production process based on outsourcing and crowdsourcing [5], manufacturing services based on mass socialization in independent organizations, and service orientation towards the mass individualization paradigm [21,23]. Social Manufacturing mode integrates mass personalization on manufacturing, information interconnection, and product services [15]. Many advanced manufacturing modes have been proposed in recent years, and the multitude of providers, being one of the most visible changes.…”

“…The social manufacturing community is formed to meet every customer need by grouping small industries according to resources. Every request from customers can be resolved together [15]. Product costs and delivery time are indicators for allocating product orders in the social manufacturing community that has been formed [16].…”

“…Product costs and delivery time are indicators for allocating product orders in the social manufacturing community that has been formed [16]. Facing the challenge of mass demand for product personalization, the manufacturing model has developed into social manufacturing [15], where stakeholders who have manufacturing resources share, for example, small medium-size enterprises (SMEs), logistics service providers, and factory warehouse providers [17], forming a community, referred to as SMR [18,19], based on social media collaborating with manufacturers to produce a product [20]. Many SMEs and individuals have sprung up with socialized resources and participated in different segments [21].…”

Bibliometric Analysis and Systematic Literature Review in Social Manufacturing

“…The manufacturing industry has become socialized, collaborative, and social oriented [1], so many professional and socialized small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have sprung up to provide product services to meet customer needs [2,3]. Face this trend, a new social manufacturing model has been proposed to incorporate these SMEs into the community for mass personalized manufacturing [4,5,6,7]. Resources in social manufacturing are consist of the resources of each SME that are socialized and each similar SMEs grouped into one community [3].…”

Deep learning and complex network theory based analysis on socialized manufacturing resources utilisations and an application case study

“…Global overcapacity, smiling curve in value chain, sharing economy trend, highly developed internet and social media technologies, etc. boosted the emergence and development of social manufacturing mode, which is characterized by its capability of utilising socialized manufacturing resources to realize value adding (Guo and Jiang, 2018; Jiang et al, 2016; Mohajeri et al, 2014). At present, there are mainly three types of relatively mature and practically applied social manufacturing operation patterns, (1) large enterprise separating into small units and then interact with outside manufacturing resource providers and demanders (Jiang, 2019), (2) small enterprises gather into virtual communities to improve their manufacturing capability and bargaining power (Jiang, 2019), and (3) shared factory pattern in which a core enterprise interact with outside manufacturing resources providers and demanders on its production orders, equipment, and services (Jiang and Li, 2019).…”