Intelligent Manufacturing € October € 1996 € Vol. 2 € No. 10

InfoTEST Launches Net-Based Manufacturing

InfoTEST International (Denver, Colo.), an alliance of high-tech companies and organizations, has joined forces with the U.S. Government to develop an experimental information system that uses the Internet to enable manufacturers to work together on-line and respond to customers' needs anywhere in the world. The initiative -- Enhanced Product Realization (EPR) -- is believed to be the world's largest Internet-based manufacturing technology trial.

"The big Internet story for 1997 and beyond will be the ability to tap the power of tomorrow's 'extranets' -- virtual private networks that use the public Internet to enable inter-enterprise collaborative business applications, such as electronic commerce and supply chain management," predicted Troy Eid, InfoTEST's executive director.

EPR integrates the Internet with other technologies to enable collaborative manufacturing and electronic commerce computing applications such as computer-assisted design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), product data management (PDM), electronic data interchange (EDI), and multi-point desktop videoconferencing.

"These applications are used by U.S. manufacturers today, but typically work only with proprietary systems," said Eid. "This closed systems environment makes it tough to link the entire product supply chain -- manufacturers, suppliers, dealers, off-site contractors and customers -- since different computers and networks don't talk to each other."

EPR will use the Internet for virtual product design and supply chain management, Eid explained. "It will use the Internet's open standards environment, and easy-to-use Web browsers, to bring worldwide collaborative computing to the entire supply chain."

The EPR initiative -- one in a series of Internet technology trials being conducted by InfoTEST -- is directed by Laura McGee, a 16-year veteran of Texas Instruments and manager of TI's Enterprise Computing Test Laboratory in Plano, Tex.

InfoTEST members participating in the EPR project include: 3M; Bay Networks; Caterpillar; Digital Equipment Corp.; Global Commerce Link LLC; Hewlett-Packard Co.; Hughes Electronics; IBM Corp.; the Institute for Defense Analyses; Sprint; Texas Instruments; the U.S. General Services Administration; and Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge and Sandia National Laboratories.

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