CIM - still the solution for manufacturing industry

in today's economic environment, enterprises that solely rely on traditional technologies cannot meet dynamic customer demands. Hence, proactive enterprises seek the application of intelligent and integrated manufacturing systems in order to meet the customer's demands and be the winners in the competitive market. Although, with available technologies and systems in Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) and its related technologies, the application of CIM in manufacturing enterprises is a reality and can meet the need of the enterprises; today mangers in many enterprises are confused with varying technologies and new terminologies that prevail in the public domain. To make adoption and implementation issues complicated, there are many researchers pursing similar concepts but in different names to solve part of the issues that are or can be addressed by a CIM system. Therefore, this paper summarises the evolution of manufacturing technologies that are associated with developments towards a CIM system, and reviewed some of the new terminologies and technologies, which were proposed during the last four decades. This review is aimed at overcoming the confusion with the new terminologies that have been generated in the past four decades. Further, this paper articulates that all these new proposals are in deed the sub-system or sub-solutions of CIM. Finally, this article focuses on latest research developments in CIM and provides a stepwise justification methodology towards a CIM system for a small or a medium enterprise. (C) 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.