Approaches to Bringing Information Technology to Small Business Applications

The development of major engineering products such as automobiles, aircraft, computer and energy systems involves not only large highly visible developers but also an array of small businesses to carry out their specific tasks. These small businesses may be responsible for over 50% of the design/manufacturing effort. The large developers are moving rapidly toward the use of information technology to improve productivity, but the small businesses often lag behind. ARPA has established a network of eleven Electronic Commerce Resource Centers (ECRCs) specifically tailored to help small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) use information technology to integrate with major developers. This integration can lead to major advancements in concurrent engineering, distributed databases, design for manufacturing, product data modeling and linking business and technical data. This paper reports on a study of some of the new research issues that result from the use of information technology by SMEs, and approaches to addressing those issues.