大规模生产.doc

New word: Since the industrial revolution, U.S industry has been undergoing a process of continuous development. During the nineteenth century, new machines expanded the productivity of workers; and with the beginning of the twentieth century, new automation technology of mass production through transfer and assembly lines emerged. Next factory manufacturing grew to include more and more new sectors of work and finally became a complex of separated departments, each dedicated to a certain task. Although automation and computerization of those isolated islands have been increasing steadily since the early 1950s, until now, barriers of understanding and working methods have also been growing. Although the number of the blue-collar workers on the shop floor continually decreased, a large number of white-collar personnel, ranging from managers to clerks, were needed to do reams of paperwork and to transfer information among the different departments in order to tie them together. It is, therefore, obvious that automating isolated tasks in the process of product development, while relatively cost-effective, cannot alone achieve either significant savings in lead time or gains in productivity. It is also clear that those required goals can be accomplished only by automating the flow of information in the business organization and by optimizing the process of product development as a whole through adopting the systems approach. In fact, this latter solution involves complete implementation of computer integrated manufacturing (CIM). It indicates, on the one hand, that the different departments in a corporation can be electronically channeled so that each department would have an immediate access to all other departments as well as to the mainframe data store. This enables efficient control of the large corporation and, consequently, optimization of the whole system. On the other hand, CIM refers to the situation where many companies are, today, with isolated automated isl