2011, the Korean Society for Precision Engineering (KSPE) headed by the President Seung-Woo Kim from KAIST, launched a new division of KSPE called Green Manufacturing Technology for the development of green manufacturing related technologies. Professor Sung-Hoon Ahn from Seoul National University (SNU) was appointed as the founding president of this new division and has held this position from 2011 to 2014.

As the first international activity of the division, Professor Ahn with a group of Professors from SNU and Green Manufacturing Technology division launched the International Symposium on Green Manufacturing and Applications (ISGMA) in 2011, and the first symposium was held at SNU. Professor Chong-Nam Chu (SNU) chaired the symposium, and Professor Jongwon Kim (SNU, President of IAMD), Professor Sung-Hoon Ahn (SNU, President of KSPE Green Manufacturing Division), Fritz Prinz(Stanford University), David Dornfeld (UC Berkeley), and Ichiro Inasaki (Chubu University, Japan, President of MIRAI) were appointed as Co-chairs.

The following ISGMA symposiums were held in Jeju Island, Korea (2012), Hawaii, USA (2013), Busan, Korea (2014), Qingdao, China (2015), Bali, donesia (2016), and Gyeongju, Korea(2017). The largest number of participants at the symposium was recorded at Hawaii in 2013 with over 600 participants from 20 countries.

In 2018, ISGMA was renamed to PRESM (International Symposium on Precision Engineering and Sustainable Manufacturing) to expand the scope of the symposium to cover a wider range of topics related to green manufacturing, including precision engineering. PRESM 2018 was successfully held in Sapporo, Japan with 450 participants from all over the world. The next symposium (PRESM 2019) will be held in Da Nang, Vietnam.

Based on the growing activity of ISGMA and green manufacturing technology, KSPE launched a new journal entitled 'International Journal of Precision Engineering and Manufacturing - Green Technology' (IJPEM-GT) in January 2014. From its very first issue, IJPEM-GT was indexed and now it is one of the leading journals in this field. The impact factor of IJPEM-GT in 2018 is 3.494 and it is ranked within the top 10% in the mechanical engineering field.