Manufacturer's Library

Manufacturing 2000, by William L. Duncan, AMACOM Books, 277 pages, $29.95, ISBN 0-8144-0235-6

As technological advances ignite rapid-fire changes in the world of manufacturing, how can manufacturers best prepare their organizations for the future? What steps can they take to ensure continued productivity, to maintain a competitive edge in what some foresee as turbulent times to come?

The author, a technology visionary, believes manufacturers must "anticipate change, initiate change and shape change" to succeed in today's - and tomorrow's - global marketplace. In this book, Duncan presents his model for predicting trends, assessing needs and achieving goals. The model is based on "thinking in three dimensions," and it provides:

a framework for identifying and evaluating trends in technology and the manufacturing environment to create an accurate vision of an organization's future; and
a "critical-path" approach to orchestrating all the actions required to fulfill that vision, with the goal of meeting every demand and change the future brings.

The book probes the changes in technologies, materials, workers and environmental factors that will shape U.S. industry (see chart below). On the factory floor, for instance, Duncan reviews current leading-edge processes from lasers to a host of nontraditional machining processes. On a company level, he spans current technologies from activity-based costing to concurrent engineering. Turning to the larger business world, he examines the impact of political issues (e.g., deregulation and protectionism), social influences and economic concerns on manufacturers.

Long-Term Factors Affecting Manufacturing:

1995-2010: Quality, Concurrent Engineering and Globalization
2010-2030: Knowledge-Based Systems, Infrastructure-Building and Seamless Technology
2030-2050: Microfabrication, Virtual Marketing and Testing, and Biocomputers
Beyond 2050: Microassembly, Replication and a Return to Space

Duncan is director of materials management for McDonnell Douglas (Mesa, Ariz.).

Design and Implementation of Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, edited by Hamid R. Parsaei and Mohammad Jamshidi, Prentice Hall, 408 pages, $75. ISBN 0-13-458217-9

The goal of emerging intelligent manufacturing is to model the skills and knowledge of manufacturing experts so that intelligent equipment and machines can produce products with little or no human intervention. This advanced-level interdisciplinary handbook draws together contributions from electrical, mechanical and industrial engineers at the forefront of automation, control and enhanced manufacturing proesses. To help readers keep pace, this book addresses topics of intelligent manufacturing from a variety of theoretical, empirical, design and implementation perspectives. This book explores such topics as: components of intelligent knowedge-based systems; geometric modeling and feature-based design; automatic machine programming; adaptive control; machine learning; intelligent material handling systems; feature-based automated process planning; object-oriented manufacturing databases; fuzzy logic control of manufacturing systems; intelligent scheduling and cost estimating systems; knowledge-based systems for equipment selection; and knowledge-based systems for cell formation and machine layout.

Parsaei is with the University of Louisville, and Jamshidi is with the University of New Mexico.

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