UK President of the Board of Trade Michael Heseltine – he eschewed the title of Secretary of State for Trade & Industry, but that’s what he is – opened a new UKP3m Computer Integrated Manufacturing Centre, set up under the auspices of the Warwick Manufacturing Group at Warwick University, on Friday. Using hardware and software donated by Computervision Corp, Oracle Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc, in combination with industrial machinery supplied by the likes of Maho and Hahn & Kolb, the new centre is designed to create a Totally Integrated Enterprise, simulating industrial processes and demonstrating how they benefit from the of integration of manufacturing and computer systems. The facility will comprise systems for sales and order processing, computer-aided design and manufacturing, process planning, Digital Numerical Control, tool management, Material Requirements Planning II, scheduling, computer-aided inspection and shop floor data collection. It is based on client-server architecture supplied by Sun, which has contributed around UKP120,000 of hardware including a multi-processing Sparcserver 630 and six Sparcstations running under its SunOS Unix. Running on this are Oracle’s Version 6 relational database (Version 7 is promised for later), Oracle CASE and Oracle Tools; Oracle will also be providing ongoing consultancy and training support, bringing its total commitment to the project to UKP400,000. Computervision has donated a further UKP450,000 worth of software including its CADD 5 integrated design and manufacturing package, and its Engineering Data Management and FactoryNet shopfloor communications systems. It is anticipated that the computer-integrated manufacturing facility will eventually be linked to Computervision’s Coventry design plant. All companies involved have stressed long-term interest in the project, viewing it as a useful environment for demonstrating their products and fine-tuning them to their customer needs. And although the aim is not to produce new technology, the possibility that new products could result indirectly from the Centre’s research is not being ruled out. Clive Reynolds, director of the Warwick Group’s Manufacturing Awareness Programme, estimates that it will take between two and three years of development work for research to take off. The Warwick Manufacturing Group was set up in 1980 by the university’s Professor S K Bhattacharyya to forge links between industry and academia and to stimulate British engineering and manufacturing industries.
