International Association for Management of Technology IAMOT 2016 Conference Proceedings

SOCIAL MANUFACTURING BAMBOO BIKES FOR AFRICA CI RAS

Stellenbosch University, STC-LAM, Stellenbosch, 7600, South Africa [email protected]

GA OOSTHUIZEN

Stellenbosch University, STC-LAM, Stellenbosch, 7600, South Africa [email protected]

JFW DURR

Stellenbosch University, STC-LAM, Stellenbosch, 7600, South Africa [email protected]

P DE WET

Stellenbosch University, STC-LAM, Stellenbosch, 7600, South Africa [email protected]

MD BURGER

Stellenbosch University, STC-LAM, Stellenbosch, 7600, South Africa [email protected]

JF OBERHOLZER

Stellenbosch University, STC-LAM, Stellenbosch, 7600, South Africa [email protected]

Abstract Manufacturing methods constantly change to adapt to societal needs. However, there is a new method aimed towards value creation emerging. This method or manufacturing paradigm is described as social manufacturing, which combines manufacturing with open design platforms. Open design platforms, along with the Internet of Things (IoT), can enable local and global communities to contribute to the design process, which will enhance the innovation process. This will produce products that are co-created, which means the products will meet customer demand faster and ensure this by using existing solutions to produce even more solutions. The emerging synthesis from open design platforms and the involvement of online communities, where users co-create and co-manufacture their own products, is the basis of social manufacturing. This paper discusses a Bamboo Bikes for Africa case study where the open design process is used through an online community using social manufacturing techniques. This paper identifies and compare different business element of social manufacturing and this study proved that using crowd sourcing and co-creation, designs can be developed and improved to generate a significant amount of innovative designs. These social manufacturing elements are promising for future manufacturing development and generating a generic business model for social manufacturing. Key words: Open Design, Bamboo Bicycles, Social Manufacturing

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Introduction Manufacturing products ensure value creation from natural resources. Ever since the industrial revolution, manufacturing has changed its emphasis from mass production and product variety a number of times. This is driven by changes in societal and market imperatives and the development of new enabling technologies (Koren, 2010).

Figure 1: Change in manufacturing paradigms with regards economics of scale and economics of scope (Ras, et al., 2015)

Figure 1 illustrates these changes in manufacturing paradigms, with regards to economics of scale and scope, showing when the emphasis changed. With the invention of assembly lines, manufacturers were concentrated on producing large volumes of products, with low customisability. This was the era of craft production and mass production, however emphasis on producing larger volumes of products continued until the market become saturated around the 1970’s. Many products were mass produced and society demanded greater variety, giving birth to the era of flexible production. This trend continues until around the year 2000, where manufacturing changed to a greater emphasis on customisation and personalisation. However social manufacturing is the new manufacturing revolution. Social manufacturing platforms will enable manufacturers to produce products and small companies, local suppliers and customers can develop products using open design platforms (Ras, et al., 2015). An industrial revolution, driven by the Internet of Things, has given rise to various manufacturing strategies worldwide (Burmeister, et al., n.d.; Bauerhansl, 2013). Examples are Catapult in the United Kingdom, SIP in Japan, Industry 4.0 in Germany and NNMI in the United States (Tao, et al., 2014; Markillie, 2012; Schuh, et al., 2014). Kagermann, et al. (2013) decribe this revolution as the convergence of the virtual world and the physical world in the form of Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS). Changes in production methods, customer expectations and value creation will occur as a result of this era of manufacturing. Because of these changes, the focus point in manufacturing should changes from products and service innovation to business model innovation.

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International Association for Management of Technology IAMOT 2016 Conference Proceedings

A case study is required in order to understand the business model of social manufacturing. An experiment can be conducted where the community or industrial cluster is used within a manufacturing process. An industrial cluster is the “social community and economic agents” (Oosthuizen, et al., 2014) that collectively strives to produce a superior product and/or service. A social community is an ever-changing body of people. Thus, by using a social media platform, their idea creation, knowledge and niche-spotting capacity could be harnessed to address seemingly overwhelming problems. This paper illustrates the use of social media as a design platform. It uses a case study of a final year engineering class, tasked to design bamboo bicycle frames. An effective transport system is one of the major problems in Africa, therefore using this Bamboo Bikes for Africa Project to create bicycles for rural Africa is essential and it can change the face of transport in Africa. Bamboo is used, because it is a sustainable material that will contribute significantly to the manufacturing industry and local communities in Africa. This project does not aim to only give these people a means of transport, however the aim is to enrich their lives and businesses, therefore adding ‘Swiss army knife’ like technology to these bicycles to improve their way of living. Social Manufacturing According to Koren (2010), personal and social networking relationships can create value to organisations, by allowing them to utilise the resources within a network for their benefit. This is the premise on which social manufacturing is built. Social manufacturing is described as a new kind of networked manufacturing mode, integrating many distributed, socialised resources, and bundles enterprises into manufacturing communities (Zhang, et al., 2012). This results in the formation of manufacturing communities by initial clustering and selforganisation. An enabler of this social manufacturing, or crowd sourced manufacturing, is web 2.0 technologies (Vukovic, et al., 2010). The ability to generate new knowledge can play a significant role in staying competitive. Open design platforms use this ability to change the manner in which knowledge is constructed around manufacturing, leading to new and faster methods to solve problems through co-creation (Day & Zimmerman, 1983; Kagermann, et al., 2013). Social manufacturing is predicted to be in use by 2020. Figure 2 shows the intended business model, which implements a pull system (sale-produce-assembly). The resulting value chain causes a sustainable conscious society, with a demand for personalised products. The internet of things allows social manufacturing to be driven forward and can thus be seen as an enabling technology. Self-organising systems can be seen as a key technology, while information and knowledge processing is based on a cyber-physical system.

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Paradigm

Social Manufacturing

Societal Needs

Personalised products Sustainability conscious

Market

Global production – demand fluctuation

Local Motors

Business Model

Pull (sale-produce-assemble)

Shapeways – 3D printing

Enabling Technology

Internet of things

WindowFarms

Key technology

Self-organizing systems

Blender

Cyber-physical systems

OpenStructures

Information processing

&

knowledge

Existing Social Manufacturing companies on

demand

–

Opendesk

Figure 2: Social manufacturing elements (Adapted from (Ras, et al., 2015))

Social manufacturing has the ability to create opportunities for internal related work or work with corporate partners. This is done by providing all involved parties with access to the relevant information, allowing them to transfer and share documents, and to automate tasks which were traditionally done manually. This results in an accelerated process and decision making. While traditional manufacturing companies rely on internal design, social manufacturing companies allow any interested party with internet access to submit designs and ideas. An open database allows these designs and ideas to be shared, where other people can contribute by suggesting improvements or adding it themselves. The design period can be shortened by using increasing amounts of crowd sourcing. This is done by identifying patterns from emerging synthesis quicker, assisting in developing customer demanded products faster as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: The effect of open design on the design process during product development (Ras, et al., 2015)

Furthermore, in social manufacturing, the manufacturing is done by the user or the market. Manufacturing capabilities are embedded within the online community platform database. This allows social manufacturing companies to both design and prototype products faster, utilising more human resources, at a reduced cost. This is illustrated in Figure 4. Therefore identifying and comparing the different business elements of social manufacturing and generating a generic business model for social manufacturing is essential to incorporate social manufacturing within current manufacturing companies.

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International Association for Management of Technology IAMOT 2016 Conference Proceedings

Figure 4: Comparing efficient utilization of social- and traditional manufacturing methodologies (not to scale – for illustrative purposes only) (Ras, et al., 2015)

Research Methodology The research methodology is summarized with the flow chart in Figure 5. Using the literature study in the first two sections, along with Figure 2 and the One Week Challenge (Steenkamp, et al., 2016) a framework is developed for social manufacturing. This framework is divided into three sections that can be seen in Figure 6, Figure 7 and Figure 8. The first section is described as the key elements of social manufacturing (Figure 6), these elements summarizes all the different aspects that needs to be taken into consideration to incorporate social manufacturing within a business. Understanding • Literature Study • Case Studies

Background study

Framework

• One Week Challenge • Questionnaires

• Key elements • Product Development Lifecycle • Framework for Bamboo Bike Project

Validation Experiment • Bamboo Bike Project

Figure 5: Research Methodology for Bamboo Bikes for Africa

Framework for Social Manufacturing Apart from the key elements from Figure 6, there are numerous other factors that have to be taken into consideration for each key element. Therefore a product development lifecycle is generated for social manufacturing as seen in Figure 7. This lifecycle or process summarizes all the factors and at what phase of the product lifecycle these factors have to be taken into consideration. For this experiment the product lifecycle will only be used for the first four phases called: ‘Plan, Concept, Design and Validate’. The reason the production and support phases are not included is, because the product is not produced within the timeframe of this case study. The first four phases have to be used along with the key elements to develop a framework for the Bamboo Bikes for Africa case study and to incorporate social manufacturing in a business model; therefore each key element will be discussed individually in this section.

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Socially Driven Process Co-creative Open Designers

Changing Societal Needs

Social Manufacturing Crowd Funding Mechanisms

Sustainable Product or Service Smart Community Factories

Figure 6: Key elements of Social Manufacturing Framework

The first key element is Socially Driven Management. The first step to management will be to establish an online community. The online community will need an online platform for communication and co-creation purposes. Managing this online community will be essential as design filtering and quality assurance is important to validate the product. The second element is Changing Society needs Marketing. The online community will market the products amongst each other using the online platform. This will enable users to pass ideas around and use the online community to improve their designs through cocreation. This will enable only sustainable products and services to surface and be validated by the community. Therefore the products will be exactly what the customer demands as the customer designed the product. The third element is Co-creative Open Designers. The product concepts will be generated in the concept and design phases using co-creation. Simultaneously, in the design phase, the best concepts will be transformed into detailed designs and more concepts will surface. The detailed designs must then be validated by the online community to filter out the less sustainable products or services. The fourth element is Funding. Crowd funding mechanisms is significant to starting a social manufacturing business. The product will fund itself when the production is complete; however for initial funding, crowd funding mechanisms can be used. For this project the production phase is not included in the scope, therefore funding is not important. The fifth element is Community Factory. The community factory will be used where the community can get involved in the manufacturing process. This will mean users from the online community that are close to the customer will be used to manufacture the product if they have the necessary technology(3D- printing, CNC-machining or any other required machines). However due to the project scope, production and community factories will not be included.

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International Association for Management of Technology IAMOT 2016 Conference Proceedings

The sixth element is Sustainable Product or Service. The product or service that the online community generates will be analysed by the customer and the producer due to co-creation. Therefore this product or service will always be sustainable as the product will always meet customer demand, because the customer receives a product that he or she ‘designed’.

Figure 7: Social Manufacturing Product Development Lifecycle

Validation Experiment of Bamboo Bikes for Africa The Product Development Lifecycle from Figure 7 and the Key Elements from Figure 6 are used to determine what is required for this case study. Social Media will be the platform for the online community to simulate the social manufacturing experiment. In order to use Social Media data gathering is done by using social manufacturing in an industrial cluster, which is the 4th year students in the Advanced Manufacturing 414 course tutorial of the Industrial Engineering Department of Stellenbosch University. The tutorial is made up of 2 sections which should be finished in 2 weeks where the students are divided into 10 groups. The first week is the plan and concept generation phase from Figure 7. In this phase the students must design free hand sketches of Bamboo Bicycles and upload these designs onto Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Dropbox for monitoring purposes). These designs must include attachments (Swiss army knife technology) that will improve the everyday life of someone living in rural Africa. These designs must then be promoted on Bamboo Bikes for Africa’s Facebook-, Instagram- and Twitter pages. The design from each group with the most ‘Likes’ must then be used for the second week. This will act as the validation and marketing of the designs from Figure 7. The second week the students will 3D CAD model the best design from week 1. This will act as the design phase (detailed design) from Figure 7. These CAD models only include the frame of the bicycles along with the attachments (Swiss army knife technology). The students

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International Association for Management of Technology IAMOT 2016 Conference Proceedings

will then have to make a video around their design as to what makes it great. Both the video and 3D CAD model will then be posted onto Social Media to create awareness. These designs will then be used to manufacture the bicycles at Stellenbosch University and donate it to our local communities. The manufacturing process will be the production and support phases from Figure 7, however this is not in the scope of this case study. A framework was developed for the two weeks illustrated in Figure 8.

Figure 8: The two week framework illustrating the open design and co-creation steps

A questionnaire was given to the students to determine their perspective and experience of social manufacturing. The questionnaire can give an indication to whether people would get involved with a social manufacturing company. The rest of the results captured in this study are based on the data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Dropbox. The questionnaire asked 4 important questions with regards to social manufacturing and this section will go through the results of the questionnaire. The first question summarizes what the common knowledge is around Co-Creation and Open Source Software. As you can see from Figure 9 a), 65% of the students indicated that they have heard or know about the terms Co-Creation and/or Open Source Software. This means that the age group between 20 to 23 years of age do know about the basic principles of social manufacturing. a) Do you know anything about 'CoCreation' and/or 'Open Source Software'?

b) Do you think a company can use a online community to design products and will you get involved in something like that? 1%

3%

Yes to both

Yes

35%

Yes it will work, but no I wont contribute

22% 65%

No

74%

No it wont work, but yes i will contribute No to both

Figure 9 a) Questionnaire results of common knowledge of Co-Creation and/or Open Source Software and b) online community involvement potential

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International Association for Management of Technology IAMOT 2016 Conference Proceedings

The second question summarizes the perspective of the students on whether a manufacturing company can use an online community to design products and if they would get involved with the company. As illustrated in Figure 9 b), 96% of students believe that a company can use an online community in the design phase and 74% of them will get involved. This indicates that in the future, people from this age group will embrace the idea of a social manufacturing company using an online community in the design phase. The third question summarizes the perspective of the students on the reasons, if any, why they would get involved with an online manufacturing community. As illustrated in Figure 10 a), 81% of students will get involved for no financial reward, where 45% of that is to help others find practical solutions and only 18% will do it for financial reward. This indicates that people will contribute to the design phase of a social manufacturing company without a financial reward which would make the design phase for manufacturing significantly cheaper. a) If you would get involved in designing a product online what would the reason be? 1%

b) Have you ever used the internet to find practical solutions? 1%

To help others find practical solutions Social Reward

11%

28%

Self Expression

45%

18%

Yes a few times

Reputation

71%

For a financial reward

4% 14%

Yes all the time

No,Never

I will not get involved

7%

Figure 10 a) Questionnaire results of reasons for online community involvement and b) using the internet to find practical solutions

The fourth question summarizes the perspective of the students on whether they use the internet to find practical solutions. As illustrated in Figure 10 b), 99% of students use the internet to find practical solutions and 71% do it on a regular basis. This indicates that people use the internet to find practical solutions and therefore a social manufacturing company will be able to source practical solutions from an online community. The questionnaire proved that for an Industrial 4th year student class between the age of 20 and 23 years the idea of a social manufacturing company is something to consider. The students indicated that most of them currently use online communities to find practical solutions and most of them will get involved for no financial reward. These factors indicate the strong possibility of a manufacturing company using an online community in the design phase. The next step is to analyse the data obtained from the students with regards to their designs and the data from the various social media platforms. From the 10 groups of students, they delivered 151 bamboo bicycle designs in one week. This meant that each group designed 15 bicycles on average.

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International Association for Management of Technology IAMOT 2016 Conference Proceedings

After analysing the growth rate of the quality of each design, the conclusion was that the quality of the design process followed a trend line as illustrated by the black line in Figure 11. The Facebook page was used to show the students a few examples on how their designs had to look and the quality of their designs. However if the example designs of the required product is of higher quality, the online community or students in this case will try to improve or equal the example designs. This will have a significant effect on the final design as the online community will continue to improve on all the designs which will mean that the quality of the design process will follow the blue line in Figure 11, which will ultimately deliver an ‘exceptional’ design.

Figure 11: Design quality improvement over time (Not to scale-only for illustrative purposes)

The next step is to analyse the different Social Media platforms. The students were requested to promote all their designs on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to see on which platform they could get the most Likes. As illustrated in Figure 12 a), Facebook got a total of 8472 Likes, Instagram 2013 Likes and Twitter 68 Likes. From these results we can see, because Facebook and Instagram focuses more on photos rather than text like Twitter, people reacted more to the photos rather than text. Facebook has more users and user functions than Instagram and this is clear with Facebook generating 4 times the amount of likes than that of Instagram. This indicates that if a social manufacturing company wants to use social media, it should choose or create a platform, which has significant amount of users and the users should have functionality to share, comment, repost, edit or anything that would create more interaction between users.

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a) 9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

350 Amount of Page Likes

Total Likes

b) 302

315

319

324

325

4

5

6

7

300 250

209

200 150

94

100 50

0

0 Facebook Likes Instagram Likes Twitter Likes

0

1

2

3 Days

Social Media Platforms

Figure 12 a) Total amount of likes for all the posts on the different Social Media platforms and b) Bamboo Bikes for Africa page Likes

Looking at the Bamboo Bikes for Africa Facebook page, students were requested to like our Facebook page where they would ultimately post all their designs. The class totalled at 89 students and as illustrated in Figure 12 b), in 7 days the Facebook likes increase from 0 to 325. This means the amount of likes is more than 3 times the amount of students, in other words each student, on average, brought at least 2 to 3 extra followers to our page. Remember this is only the amount of people that liked the page not all the people who viewed the page. In order to establish the amount of views of the page and posts the total reach is important. As illustrated in Figure 13 a), in 7 days the Bamboo Bikes for Africa posts reached 10552 people. This is significant as the students were only 89 people which transformed into a total reach of more than 10000. The total post reach proves the power of using Social Media as it is easy to connect to a very large online community in a short period of time. a)

b) 10267 10405 10552

Amount of Activity (Sharing, Comments and Likes)

Amount of People Reached

12000 9475

10000 8000 5924

6000 4000 1865 1014

2000 0

0 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Days

1400

1232

1240

1245

5

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7

1152

1200 1000 800 512

600 400 200

0

41

75

1

2

0 0

3

4

Days

Figure 13 a) Total Post Reach on Facebook Page and b) Facebook Page Activity

The next step is to look at the amount of activity on the Facebook page. This includes the amount of shares, comments and likes experienced only on the page. As illustrated in Figure 13 b), in 7 days the Bamboo Bikes for Africa page had 1245 page activity. This is significant

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as the page only has 325 likes which means each person, on average, contributed at least 4 times in one week to the page. It is important to notice from Figure 12 and Figure 13 that the most activity happened from day 1 to 4. The reason for this was that the cut-off date for submissions on the Facebook page was on the fourth day. Therefore if the submissions continued, the activity might keep on rising at the same slope as in these three figures. Week 2 of the project was used for the students to 3D CAD model, on Autodesk Inventor, the design from each group with the most likes from week 1. The CAD process needs to only show the frame of the bicycle along with the attachments that gives the bicycle its ‘Swiss army knife’ like technology. Included in the Figure 14 is a few of the final CAD designs.

Figure 14: Final CAD Designs

The best design was chosen for the final Bamboo Bicycle that needs to be manufactured. The entire bicycle frame is manufactured from bamboo and the joints are made of a combination of steel and fibreglass. Shown in Figure 15 is the final product of the manufactured Bamboo Bicycle.

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Figure 15: Final Bamboo Bicycle

Conclusion The business model elements of social manufacturing are explored and compared to traditional manufacturing methods. The research and conceptual design phase of social manufacturing compared to traditional design phases is shorter. This case study proved that using social manufacturing the design phase can produce more designs in a shorter amount of time than a traditional design method. Through analysing the designs, it was shown that an even higher quality design can be generate by improving the first example design that is shown to the online community. The case study showed using an online community that a social manufacturing company can involve significantly more people than with a traditional manufacturing process. This paper indicates the business benefit of crowd sourcing and using an online community in the design phase of a manufacturing company. Bibliography Avital, M., 2011. The generative bedrock of open design. In: Abel, B.v. (ed.) Open design now. Why design cannot remain exclusive. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: BIS Publishers. Bauerhansl, T., 2013. Industrie 4.0- Wie die 4 Industrielle Revolution die Prozesse in der Produktion Verandert. Burmeister, C., Lüttgens, D. & Piller, F. T., n.d. Business Model Innovation for Industrie 4.0: Why the "Industrial Internet" Mandates a New Perspective on Innovation. Volume 0, pp. 131.

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Currey, A., 2015. A Quick and Dirty Guide to 10 Social Media Platforms for the Newbie. [Online] Available at: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/aag/2015-07-11/quick-anddirty-guide-10-social-media-platforms-newbie [Accessed 12 October 2015]. Day, J. & Zimmerman, H., 1983. The OS1 Reference model. s.l., Proceedings of the IEEE, pp. 1334-1340. Diederik, V. et al., 2014. Smart Factories: Crowdsourced Manufacturing. Business Innovation Observatory. D'Onfro, J., 2015. How a 'Quirky' 28-Year-Old Plowed Through $150 Million and Almost Destroyed His Startup. [Online] Available at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245678 [Accessed 12 October 2015]. Kagermann, H., Henning, P. A., Wolfgang, W. & Johannes, 2013. Recommendations for implementing the strategic initiative INDUSTRIE 4.0. Issue April, p. 82. Koren, Y., 2010. Globalization and Manufacturing Paradigms. Glob. Manuf. Revolut. Prod., pp. 1-40. Koren, Y., Hu, S., Gu, P. & Shpitalni, M., 2013. Open-architecture products. CIRP Annals Manufacturing Technology, 62(2). Markillie, P., 2012. Manufacturing and innovation: A Third Industrial Revolution. Oosthuizen, G. et al., 2014. Open Community Manufacturing. Muldersdrift, s.n. Oosthuizen, G. et al., 2014. Open Community Manufacturing. SAIIE, Volume 1155, pp. 1-14. Pritschow, G. et al., 2001. Open Controller Architecture - Past, Present and Future. CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology, 50(2), pp. 463-470. Ras, C. I. et al., 2015. Social manufacturing business model elements to support local suppliers. Pretoria, RAPDASA. Ras, C. I. et al., 2015. Social manufacturing business model elements to support local suppliers. Pretoria, s.n. Redlich, T., 2012. Open Production Gestaltungsmodell für die Wertschöpfung in der Bottomup-Ökonomie. Schuh, G. et al., 2014. Collaboraton Mechanisms to Increase Productivity in the Context of Industrie 4.0. Procedia CIRP, 19(RoMac), pp. 51-56.

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Steenkamp, L. P., Ras, C. I. & Oosthuizen, G. A., 2016. Emerging Synthesis of Social Manufacturing. Stellenbosch, COMA. Tao, F. et al., 2014. CCIoT-CMfg: Cloud computing and internet of things-based cloud manufacturing service system. IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics, 10(2), pp. 1435-1442. Ueda, K., Takenaka, T., Vancza, J. & Monostori, L., 2009. Value creation and decisionmaking in sustainable society. CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology , 58(2), pp. 681700. Vukovic, M., Kumara, S. & Greenshpan, O., 2010. Ubiquitous crowdsourcing. Proc. 12th ACM Int. Conf. Adjun. Pap. Ubiquitous Comput.- Ubicomp '10, p. 523. Zhang, F., Jiang, P., Zhu, Q. & Cao, W., 2012. Modeling and analyzing of an enterprise collaboration network supported by service-oriented manufacturing. roc. Inst. Mech. Eng. Part B J Eng. Manuf., 226(9), pp. 1579-1593.

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