Abstract
The collaboration hub has been developed since 2004 as an online collaboration space, which supports the various collaborative works amongst small and medium enterprises using information sharing, collaboration project management, and project history management. Because of the change of manufacturing environment and rapid development of information technologies, it should be evolved from the existing version called Collaboration Hub 1.0. Recently, a lot of manufacturing enterprises know the importance of business process management(BPM) and start to introduce BPM systems. Our research group has developed the new version of Collaboration Hub 1.0 called Collaboration Hub 2.0 which contains the BPM concept, the consistent product data management, and the specialized functions overcoming the various variation of manufacturing. This study scrutinizes the meaning and role of the Collaboration Hub 2.0 and introduces an application study of it to the value chain of automobile module development consisted of a leading company and subcontractors. The case study covers the definition, execution and monitoring of collaboration process, the specialized functions overcoming the manufacturing variation and the key performance index of collaboration business.
