Research on collaborative application portal of mould and hard disk drive industry

Abstract

Large companies are looking for information and communication technologies to manage their resources, while they also expect their business partners and suppliers to quickly adopt appropriate technologies and business strategies. Due to the limitation of SMEs' financial and technical capability, they must change the way they do businesses and improve the way they develop products. This paper presents a collaborative application portal (CAP) for mould and hard disk drive industry in order to provide an application platform for collaborative product design, product data management and e-business services. System architecture and pivotal technologies of CAP are explained. Supporting activities which include RFQ, collaborative design process, enterprise information system, e-commerce and knowledge management are further illustrated. Finally, a collaborative portal of hard disk drive industry in Singapore is introduced as a case study. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.