1.1 INTRODUCTION

In the past decade, so much ink has been spilled (not to mention blood and treasure) on the concepts of e-business and e-manufacturing that it has been extraordinarily difficult to separate hope from hype. If the early pronouncements from e-seers were to be believed, the Internet was destined to become a force of nature that, within only a few years, would transform manufacturers and manufacturing processes beyond all recognition. Everyone customers, suppliers, management, line employees, machines, etc. would be on-line, and fully integrated. It would be a grand alignment one that would convert a customer s every e-whim into perfectly realized product, with all customer communication and transactions handled via the web, products designed collaboratively with customers on-line, all the right inputs delivered in exactly the right quantities at exactly the right millisecond (cued, of course, over the web), machines in production across the planet conversing with each other in a web-enabled symphony of synchronization, and total process transparency of all shop floors to the top floor, making managers omniscient gods of a brave new manufacturing universe.

These initial predictions now seem overly rosy at...