Cloud-based platforms and ecosystems are widely considered as a means of supporting collaborative manufacturing networks (CMN) among companies and, in particular, manufacturing SMEs. Due to the spatial separation of manufacturing activities among the CMN partners, there is a need for monitoring and coordinating the collaborative manufacturing processes. However, little research investigates inter-enterprise information exchange systems required for such monitoring and coordination. This paper proposes an approach for cross-factory information exchange considering connectivity and interoperability between various factory data sources and cloud-based collaborative production monitoring services. The paper also introduces a cross-factory information exchange mechanism, meta-models, and architecture to facilitate the ad-hoc, target specific data exchange and addresses SMEs’ adoption barriers, namely trust, security, data control, and integration efforts. A proof of concept of the proposed approach is presented. The authors would like to thank their project partners for extensive discussions that provided thought-provoking impulses for the proof-of-concept and Florian Grötzner, Stefan Reitmayer and Issar Arab for their valuable efforts in implementing it.

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