Social manufacturing is an internet- and social network-based platform where different manufacturers' capabilities can be seen and manufacturers with similar skills and hardware levels can come together to form communities. In the horizontal community, manufacturers who have similar socialised manufacturing resources and can perform the same processing activities are brought together. In the vertical community, there are manufacturers who can take part in different production activities of a product, from raw material to final product, and combine their socialised resources in this direction. Social manufacturing allows the bargaining power of the main producer to decrease thanks to the communities it establishes. The social manufacturing platform is a virtual showcase for small-scale entrepreneurs to present their talents, an effective cost management mechanism for customers, and an interaction, coordination, and sharing tool that will maximise production efficiency for countries.
TopIntroduction
Volatile consumer expectations and dynamic markets are causing manufacturing companies to focus on mass customization. In competitive markets, businesses need to focus on more personalized and innovative product development. However, the current conditions increase the costs and decrease the productivity of the enterprises that perform all the supply, manufacturing, and distribution functions. Many activities that are not the core business of the enterprise make it unwieldy and threaten the economic sustainability. Responding to changing market trends requires being much more agile and flexible. Businesses implement a strategy of focusing on their core ability and obtain professionalized outsourcing support for their inefficient activities. In future, it is expected that outsourcing for machining parts will become a much higher priority for manufacturing enterprises.
Outsourcing has two sides. One of them is the main business that requests various machining services related to the manufacture of the product. The others are the manufacturing enterprises that have the resources to fulfill the requested tasks regarding the product of the parent enterprise. In conventional manufacturing supply chains, the main business meets its outsourcing needs with a limited number of manufacturers. Factors such as mutual distrust, incomplete information about the capabilities of the manufacturer that shares the resource, and miscommunication may require that this cooperation is limited to a small number of stakeholders (Cao et al., 2015). Contemporary production approach adopts new paradigms such as transparency, communication and sharing. Today, while individual and corporate orientation towards service industries and digital content production is observed, new production technologies are increasing, and alternative digital opportunities are being created for the development of physical production (Hamalainen et al. 2018). Social manufacturing is a new resource sharing model shaped around these paradigms. Stakeholders such as small-medium sized businesses, smart factories, workshops, logistics service providers and public warehouse providers who want to share socialized manufacturing resources for outsourced/crowdsourced tasks are united under the social manufacturing platform (Ding et al. 2018).
Social manufacturing is like cloud manufacturing in terms of its working principle. Cloud manufacturing serves to provide integration between resource providers and service requesters. Cloud manufacturing and social manufacturing are seen as cyber-physical and social systems that facilitate the analysis of big data in decision making, thus making business and relationship management efficient, flexible, and easily controllable (Jiang et al., 2016). However, cloud manufacturing has some technological inadequacies in areas such as security, resource management and scheduling, inter-organizational collaboration, logistics, etc. (Cao et al., 2015). Social manufacturing is to bring together the relevant fields of social search, social computing, and social production to connect the next-generation production network of the Internet of Things and 3D printing, and to ensure that manufacturing resources are fully involved in the entire production process (Xiong et al., 2018).
Social manufacturing is a platform that is not centrally managed and powered by social networks. In this platform, individuals can provide services on their own, within a network or within an organization (Hirscher et al., 2018). Zhou et al. (2016) discuss social manufacturing as a kind of service-oriented smart system that uses social networks to outsource production activities tasks in an organized manner between individuals and companies. However, this view emphasizes that manufacturing can also be supported by social networks, as it refers to the need to use social networks (Facebook, Linkedin, etc.) to facilitate interaction and communication with users (Hirscher et al., 2018).