With collaborative product development in a geographically distributed environment and global outsourcing becoming normal for many companies, it is imperative to bring academics, researchers and industrialists together to share research ideas and best practice. The European-Asia Symposium on Engineering Design and Manufacture (EASED 2004) provides such a platform and aims to increase the exchange of ideas and best practice among practitioners and researchers from two major global regions - Europe and Asia. As the manufacturing activities, associated with the design activities in European,...