Social Business Relationship and Organizational Network

Since manufacturing industry has become specialized, socialized, service-oriented and collaborative, mass individualized demands on products and manufacturing services have driven prosumers clustering into various communities. Lots of professional and socialized small and medium-sized prosumers spring up to provide product-service for satisfying customers’ requirements. Under this trend, a new social business relationship organizational network has been proposed to aggregate these prosumers into communities for mass individualization manufacturing. Communities are established by two steps. First, the similar prosumers are clustered into one community by growing hierarchical self-organizing map (GHSOM) algorithm. Suitable communities are selected, and then the resources are mapped to the prosumers. Second, the order is allocated to the prosumers, and thereby different order allocation strategies lead to different forms of communities. Product cost and delivery time serve as the indicators for selecting the best community. A multi-objective algorithm is proposed to tackle the order allocation problem. A case from a machinery firm is analyzed to validate the proposed model. Several rules are revealed and used for guiding practical production.