The Reading Warehouse

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This volume contains the edited version of the technical presentations of PROLMAT 2006, the IFIP TC5 international conference held on June 15-17, 2006 at the Shanghai University in China.

Profitability is no longer only a function of price, cost, and adequate quality. The way sustained competitive advantage relates to a firm is distinctive and it is difficult to replicate competencies. The basis for a firm??'s core competencies is its repository of organizational knowledge. This is highly-valued knowledge that provides opportunities for adding exclusive value to products and services of an enterprise. Knowledge strategy will be related to innovation, learning, and agility. Conversion of advanced research into advanced products; acquisition of knowledge from experience; and fast response-time to the dynamic market changes, are the important rules of international industrial competition at the moment. Innovation, learning, and agility are key factors for companies, which must shift in global markets rapidly and efficiently by delivering new products in the shortest time frame, while maintaining the highest quality and the lowest costs. The successful enterprise of our century will be characterized by an organizational structure that supports thinking process, experience transferring, knowledge discovery, and intelligence exploitation, all of which are based on data and information.

The success of a modern company is not based on its size but on its ability to adapt its operation to the changing environment. To answer to these constraints, the enterprise must develop a corporate culture that empowers employees at alllevels and facilitates communication among related groups for constant improvement of its core competitiveness. Such an organizational structure requires a technological infrastructure that fully supports process improvement and integration, and has the flexibility to adjust to unexpected changes in corporate direction. To keep up with rapid developments in global manufacturing, the enterprise must first look at its organization and culture, and then at its supporting technologies. Too often, companies invest only in technology to compete in the global market and don???t give enough attention to the training, the education, and the knowledge of their employees. This conference concentrates also on knowledge strategies in Product Life Cycle and brings together researchers and industrialists with the objectives to reach a mutual understanding of the scientific - industry dichotomy, while facilitating the transfer of core research knowledge to core industrial competencies.

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