2015 Volume 8 Issue 3 Pages 158-168
Manufacturing companies are increasingly being called upon to fulfill various social demands, such as rapid delivery, multiobjective production, quality assurance and traceability security. The introduction of information technology is needed to meet these demands and to strengthen competitiveness. However, the development, operation, and maintenance costs of IT systems are too high for their introduction into small and medium-sized companies. To encourage manufacturing companies to introduce IT systems, we have developed an IT system development framework, called "MZ Platform", which enables manufacturing industry workers to construct and operate IT systems without professional IT knowledge. We describe our research and development approaches and dissemination activities, and discuss the effectiveness of the MZ Platform.
