Imperial Motors is a car manufacturing company in Australia. The company has 4 automotive assembly plants across the country. The company like other car manufacturers worldwide is facing slowing customer demand and increasing competition. There is a mounting pressure from the government to increase fuel efficiency and reduce carbon footprint. To survive in the competitive environment, the company has to adopt new technologies, reduce manufacturing cost and improve quality.
The company is currently suffering a lot of wastage in the assembly line due to variation in product quality. Also unexpected machine breakdown in the assembly line causes a significant loss of production. These problems are partly because of lack of real-time information available about the assembly line operations. Due to this, the management is unable to monitor the situation in real-time, predict any impending breakdown or quality issues.
The company has recently implemented just-in-time (JIT) production to prevent overproduction and reduce capital tied up in the stock. As a ramification of adopting the JIT approach, assembly plants are now facing some new challenges. Unexpected weather, congestions at the port or on the road, and industrial actions occasionally cause consignment deliveries to be delayed. This results in temporary shortage of essential parts and a consequence, the production stalls. There is no intelligent system in place to track to the movement of the consignments to predict any forthcoming delay and adjust the route of the consignments accordingly to minimise that.
Occasionally, the company has to recall their cars if problems are identified in a batch. Tracking distributions and sales of the cars to be recalled causes a huge administrative burden on the company. Also the company is finding it challenging to track the asset maintenance, ensure authenticity of supply and identify counterfeit parts.
The management of Imperial Motors, in consultation with other stakeholders, is looking to create an ecosystem of e-business applications with the aid of a number of emerging technologies to deal with the abovementioned challenges.
Task:
Each of you will analyse a given case study and identify the issues arising from the case study. Based on the issues found in the case study, you will identify three e-business use cases (for example, Predictive Maintenance). You will then choose as many emerging technologies as appropriate to address those use cases. You can choose any emerging technologies that fit the use cases, even the ones not covered in the lectures.
You will write a report illustrating how the chosen emerging technologies would fit into and address the requirements of the identified e-business use cases.
In the main body of the report, you will include the following topics.
1. A background study of the chosen emerging technologies
You need to describe how the chosen emerging technologies evolved, their underlying designs, working principles, functions, and capabilities.
2. A brief description of the future potentials of the chosen emerging technologies
You need to discuss the future applications of the chosen emerging technologies in e-business in general.
3. An illustration of how the chosen emerging technologies would fit into the identified e-business use cases
You need to illustrate what issues of the identified use cases would be resolved by the chosen emerging technologies.
4. Details of how the chosen emerging technologies would address the requirements of the identified use cases
You need to elaborate how the chosen emerging technologies would interoperate to fulfill the requirements of the identified use cases
