Challenges facing information technology to support world class manufacturing

The authors pose three challenges to information technology researchers in order to meet modern manufacturing requirements of higher-quality products at a lower cost, and with shorter delivery times. The first challenge is to specify standard data structures and functional requirements for common manufacturing information applications. The second challenge is for the organizational structures of information technologists to evolve to a design-build team structure. The third is to develop software engineering tools that assess world class metrics of performance such as cost, quality, and cycle time.