for employees the following themes can be identified.- Clean manufacturing processes that can minimise effects on environment. Process emission minimised systems. Process disposal minimised systems.- Factory (process) life-cycle pre-assessed systems.Minimum consumption of energy. Energy efficient processes that can meet manufacturing requirements with minimum consumption of energy. Integrated cycled process for less energy consumption.- Modules of energy conservation type. Production management technology of energy conservation type.- Technology innovation in manufacturing processes. Methods that can quickly produce different products through "Rapid Prototyping Methods". Manufacturing processes that can flexibly respond to changes in labour conditions, changes of products or materials.- Improvement in the flexibility and autonomy of processing modules that compose manufacturing systems. Open distributed systems and their modules that can match both unmanned, man-machine mixed and labour intensive systems, and can metamorphologically architect system components in correspondence with changes of products.- Improvement in interaction or harmony among various components and functions of manufacturing. Open infrastructure for manufacturing. Inter-connected information systems such as "remote ID" among respective modules.3. Strategy/planning/design toolsManufacturing takes place in a global economy. How and where raw materials are transformed is a strategic decision. The decision is complicated in terms of what to make and where to make or buy it, in what is becoming a single global economy.Many of today's manufacturing organisations are designed using vertical and hierarchical structures. The move towards hierarchical structures is and will continue to require major changes in organisations, systems and work practices. We need methodologies and tools to help us to define appropriate manufacturing strategies and to design appropriate organisations and business/work processes.Methods and tools to support business process re-engineering. Modelling tools to support the analyses and development of manufacturing strategies.Design support tools to support planning in an extended enterprise or virtual enterprise environment.4. Human/organisation/social issues- Promotion and development projects for improved image of manufacturing. Manufacturing engineers tend to be at the bottom of the pay scale relevant to other engineers, and the profession as a whole has a lower stature. Therefore ITC considers as projects globally recognised, strong professional societies and educational institutions for the promotion of manufacturing as a discipline. These proposals include the creation of international organisations to promote manufacturing.- Improved capability of manufacturing workforce/education, training. Engineering education has often tended to emphasise theory over process. In addition, basic education has not always met the needs of industry, producing graduates with often-inadequate skills. This has led to industries that are poor at turning innovation into successful products. This necessitates a change in priorities and closer ties between industry and educational institutions. As well, changes in system organisation means that training within companies is a continuous process which seeks to update the skills and increase the potential of employees — the crucial elements in any system.- Autonomous offshore plants (integration of supplementary business functions in subsidiaries). Offshore plants were originally meant to increase market share and decrease production costs: development of the transplant labour forces were a secondary consideration. However, giving more autonomy to these plants enables them to react more flexibly to changing conditions in the areas where they are based, and is consistent with organisational ideas of decentralisation, empowerment and hierarchy flattening. It also serves to contribute to domestic development in the countries where the plants are located and further the IMS goal of spreading widely basic manufacturing knowledge.- Corporate technical memory — keeping, developing, accessing. Often in a manufacturing enterprise knowledge and sources of information are isolated or locked. "Organisational learning" is a strategy for translating such knowledge into a framework or a model that leads to better decision-making and could be an important theme within IMS.- Appropriate performance measures for new paradigms. New paradigms of manufacturing must offer superiority in performance from the points of view of costs, quality, delivery and flexibility. The first three are familiar performance criteria used for mass production, while flexibility is a key attribute of new paradigm manufacturing. To increase the acceptance of new paradigms performance evaluation methods should be developed.5. Virtual/extended enterprise issuesThe extended enterprise is an expression of the market-driven requirement to embrace external resources in the enterprise without owning them. Core business focus is the route to excellence but product/service delivery requires the amalgam of multiple world-class capabilities. Changing markets require a fluctuating mix of resources. The extended enterprises which can be likened to the ultimate customisable, reconfigurable, manufacturing resource is the goal. The operation of the extended enterprise requires take up of communications and database technologies that are near to the current state of the art. However, the main challenge is organisational rather than technological.Research and development opportunities in this area are:- methodologies to determine and support information processes and logistics across the value chain in the extended enterprise,- architecture (business, functional and technical) to support engineering cooperation across the value chain, e.g., concurrent engineering across the extended enterprise,- methods and approaches to assign cost/liability/risk and reward to elements of the extended enterprise,- team working across individual units within the extended enterprise.Technical