The term manufacturing includes all activities from the perception of a need for a product, through the conception, design and development of the product, production, marketing, and support of the product in use. Every action involved in these activities uses data, whether textual, graphic or numeric. The computer is today's primary tool for manipulating and using data. It has been used by business for generating, storing, transmitting and transforming data. Within the past two decades the computer's ability to store and manipulate data h ....