Growing interest on
business collaboration motivates todays industries, especially small and
medium enterprises (SMEs) to establish and manage dynamic and
non-hierarchical business networks to respond to market opportunities
with added business benefits. This business environment requires
concurrent work and real-time information sharing between key business
partners in order to design and develop customised products. The use of
traditional communication media such as e-mail, phone and fax is not
satisfactory to get real-time information and is time-consuming and most
often ineffective. In such environments, an Information and
Communication Technology (ICT)/Web-based technology supports real-time
information sharing among networked SMEs for the collaborative design
and manufacturing of customised products. This study proposes an
innovative ICT platform supporting SMEs collaboration, through Web and
the Internet of Things technologies, which follows the Net-Challenge
conceptual approach and methodological guidelines for SMEs to form and
operate virtual organisations for the collaborative development and
delivery of customised products. The ICT Platform was assessed in three
different industry domains, namely the textile and apparel, the footwear
and the machine tools, respectively. This ICT solution promotes
collaboration, with substantial advantages for SMEs including the
reduction of costs and delivery time and improvement of the innovation
potential. © 2016 Taylor & Francis.

Engineering controlled terms: Information analysis;
Information dissemination; Internet; Internet of things; Machine tools;
Production control; Shoe manufacture; Textile industry

Business networks; Event management; ICT; Operational monitoring; Production Planning; SMEs; Virtual organisations

Engineering main heading: Product design