Newsroom
NEMI Launches "Virtual Factory" Project
to Standardize Information Exchange
Across the Supply Chain
Project Collaborates with RosettaNet to Develop
Standard Electronic Business Interfaces
Press and Project Contacts at bottom of page
Herndon, Va. — March 6, 2000 — The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) today announced the launch of a new project that will help OEMs quickly link their factory information systems with those of their suppliers. The Virtual Factory Information Interchange Project (VFIIP) will define standards that, when implemented, will shorten the time and reduce the cost required to establish and maintain information exchange partnerships across the manufacturing supply web.
Founding members of the Virtual Factory Project are Agile Software, Celestica, GenRad, Georgia Institute of Technology, Intel, Lucent Technologies, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NetFish Technologies, Nortel Networks, Solectron and Universal Instruments. Project leaders are John Cartwright of Intel, Barbara Goldstein of NIST, John Minchella of Celestica and Joanne Friedman of Celestica.
"As OEMs continue to outsource an increasing breadth of production processes to their network of suppliers, enterprise relationships are no longer one-to-one or even one-to-many. Instead, they are complex, distributed relationships in which many strategic partners, downstream suppliers and customers need to collaborate and share data to compete effectively," says Barbara Goldstein, co-chair of NEMI’s VFIIP and project leader of the Infrastructure for Integrated Electronics Manufacturing Project at NIST. "OEMs are forming ‘virtual enterprises’ or ‘e-factories’ with electronic manufacturing services (EMS) providers and other organizations within the supply chain in order to achieve greater flexibility in response to unpredictable market conditions. However, the serious lack of standards for information integration among cross-company and inter-company systems is complex and can limit any potential efficiency gains."
The Virtual Factory Project builds on the work of NEMI’s Plug & Play Factory Project, which wrapped up its efforts in December. While Plug & Play focused on interoperability on the factory floor, Virtual Factory extends interoperability from within an enterprise to information systems distributed across business partners. It will address the bi-directional exchange of information between OEMs and EMS providers for board and final assembly, centering on the exchange of technical engineering and manufacturing data, but not procurement supply chain interactions. Emerging standards that are functionally adequate or extensible to meet the needs of the electronics manufacturing industry will be adopted by VFIIP. These include, for example, the emerging GenCAM CAD/CAM standard, and the emerging Electronic Component Information Exchange (ECIX) standard for component information.
NEMI is working closely with IPC, which has established the 2570 series of standards for supply chain communication specifically for the standards generated by the Virtual Factory Project. VFIIP is also collaborating with the Open Applications Group (OAG), which focuses on best practices and process-based XML content for e-business and application integration.
In addition, NEMI has become a coalition partner of RosettaNet and is collaborating with the group on development of standard electronic business interfaces. The Virtual Factory Project will utilize the structure and methodology of RosettaNet to develop and deploy solutions. RosettaNet will promote the use of the data interchange standards resulting from collaborative efforts between the two groups.
"RosettaNet has developed significant momentum within the electronic components and information technology supply chains and has commitments from its member companies to adopt the standards it creates," says Goldstein. "By working together, we will have a much greater chance of gaining industry-wide adoption of standard interfaces and solutions."
About NEMI
The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative was formed in November 1994 to facilitate long-term North American leadership in electronics. The industry-led consortium is made up of more than 50 electronics equipment manufacturers, suppliers, associations, government agencies and universities. NEMI’s members represent a combined total of more than $200 billion in 1998 revenues and employ more than 1.25 million people.
NEMI roadmaps the needs of the North American electronics industry, identifies gaps in the technology infrastructure, establishes implementation projects to eliminate these gaps, and stimulates standards activities to speed the introduction of new technologies. The consortium also works with government, universities, and other funding agencies to set priorities for future industry needs and R&D initiatives.
Glossary
GenCAM CAD/CAM — the Generic Computer Aided Manufacturing (GenCAM) standard, which is under development by IPC, has the goal of reducing the costs of non-value-added translation of design data for the production of circuit board assemblies. GenCAM is a method of representing data associated with an electronic assembly in a standards-based manner. Some of the data contained in a GenCAM file includes: the board layout, location of components, electrical traces, definition of test fixtures, artwork and administration data. In addition to the original design data, changes to the data are included directly in the file so that revision history can easily be ascertained. (www.gencam.org)
ECIX — the Electronic Component Information Exchange standard developed by Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) for creation, exchange and use of electronic component information. (www.si2.org/ecix)
OAG — Open Applications Group is a non-profit consortium focusing on best practices and process-based XML content for e-business and application integration. It is the largest publisher of XML based content for business software interoperability in the world. OAG members have over five years of extensive experience in building this industry consensus-based framework for business software application interoperability and have developed a repeatable process for quickly developing high quality business content and XML representations of that content.
RosettaNet — an independent, self-funded, non-profit consortium dedicated to the development and deployment of standard electronic business interfaces to align the processes between supply chain partners on a global basis. Launched in June 1998, RosettaNet is currently in the pilot phase of its implementation cycle. More than 60 companies representing $600 billion in annual revenues currently provide the mandate for RosettaNet’s standards development strategy. A complete list of member companies and more information on RosettaNet can be found at www.rosettanet.org.
XML — extensible mark-up language, the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web.
Project information:
Dave Godlewski
NEMI
717-651-0522
dgodlewski@nemi.org
Press information:
Cynthia Williams
207-871-1260
cwilliams@nemi.org