Frank Lynch, Charles Marshall, Dennis O'Connor, and Mike Kiskiel II

A Broadened Perspective of Manufacturing: The Knowledge Network In order to form a vision and a strategy, we took a broad new look at our manufacturing business. The perspective ranged from the customer at the point of sale through point of manufacture and point of distribution and back to the customer. In 1981 DEC coined the term knowledge network to represent this notion (O'Connor 1984) (see figure 1). In many of these "pockets of expertise, " within DEC or any other manufacturing business, the expertise and the reasons for making decisions are generally undocumented or are unavailable to all the parties needing the information. Two Views of the Business Within the knowledge network two major cycles are apparent: the order-process cycle and the product life cycle The order-process cycle (see figure 2) is oriented around taking, manufacturing, delivering, and servicing an order.