Web cost simulation service for footwear sector

Abstract

Companies, wanting to access new ICT tools, have to go through new technology acquisition. Firms in the manufacturing sector, as in our case shoe producers, increasingly have the need to improve collaboration and co-operation across the company. They are more and more interested in building networks with the support of business integrators as service providers that can offer services and tools and guarantee security standards. This study proposes a new tool, that has been developed by a service provider of the footwear sector, to support shoe producers in managing automatically through a web application the costs of their orders to compare their and other shoe producers processes and to support what-if analysis. A first prototype for such kind of service is proposed and further developments are suggested.

Acknowledgement

This paper has been partially conducted thanks to the support of the IST project No. IST-2001-35104: e-MMEDIATE, ‘Electronic Managing of Product Manufacturing, Engineering, Design and Investment Applying Information Technology for SMEs’.