Cloud Manufacturing från ett produktion utvecklingsperspektiv

Enterprises, companies and manufacturing industry are reshaping their business and manufacturing models, because of highly competitive markets that originates from the globalization phenomenon. Following that, new engineering paradigms and concepts are being used to achieve optimum level of agility, flexibility, creativity, efficiency and collaboration among the industries and businesses with distributed environments. The cloud computing concept was presented to satisfy the need for more availability, reliability and scalability in distributed environments. Succeeding that, the cloud manufacturing concept was presented to facilitate the adaption and overcoming the limitations of cloud computing concept in industry. According to previous research, further investigations from specific perspectives is needed to affect the executives, engineers and manager’s comprehension toward adaption of cloud manufacturing, because they still hesitate to consider the cloud manufacturing concept as a catalyst for facilitation of their transformation process toward globalization. The purpose of this thesis is to facilitate the understanding of the cloud manufacturing concept among production managers and engineers and the aim is to build a common ground and present a unified picture about the current state and contributions of the cloud manufacturing concept to production related activities. The thesis uses a systematic literature review methodology followed by a quantitative descriptive analysis and a qualitative analysis of contents. The analysis was made related to the Y model description of production activities. The findings indicate that, the cloud manufacturing concept can contribute to all the functions within production but the state of coverage of functions is not homogeneous and not yet enough so that production managers and engineers can consider using the cloud manufacturing solutions. Following that, the cloud manufacturing concept is still in the beginning of its path from providing functional solutions towards the point of being a generally usable concept with practical solutions for production development activities. Hence, to build a common ground which can lead to the creation of usable cloud manufacturing solutions with tangible outcomes, more attention must be paid to how to operationalize the contribution to each separate function of production, especially those that are less researched at the moment