Sustaining the Competitive Edge of Small to Medium Size Enterprises Through Innovative Manufacturing System Design

Increasing Small to Medium size Enterprises (SME’s) competitive edge requires continuously developing creative and novel methods and solutions. This paper presents a novel design for a manufacturing system named Smart Manufacturing Systems (SMS). The new design can be viewed as a modification to the Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) to better suits continuously changing market conditions, which may lead a company to develop a more sustainable competitive edge. The new design address several issues in manufacturing system design that affect the competitiveness of the system such as: merger of different manufacturing processes, non-productive times, and to be able to performing economically under different market conditions.