The concept of enterprise integration

Abstract

Managers and information scientists, control engineers and others have long been intrigued by the concept that one should be able to correlate and use, at any one time, all of the information then available concerning an enterprise, to systematically improve the operability, profitability, agility, competitivity (and many other important characteristics) of these systems. Such a desire was, for example, the basis for the development of the field of computer integrated manufacturing which is built upon the ability of the computer to handle vast amounts of data or information in very short periods of time. However, although many projects have been initiated in many types of industries in recent years to try to achieve these dreamed-of-benefits, the results achieved, in many cases, have been disappointing at best. In addition, where successes have been achieved, no clear path for obtaining future successes in subsequent applications has become clear. The following is an important summary of the state-of-the-field of Enterprise Integration (including CIM), and points out what had been learned prior to the work of the Task Force as described herein. 2.2 THE STATUS OF ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION An Integrated Manufacturing System solution cannot be bought off the shelf; each firm must be involved in devising its own, which explains why methodologies must be made available so that CIM systems can be built. Designing a CIM system meets with a number of difficulties: • The system is extremely complex, so some special techniques must be used to understand this complexity in order to efficiently act on it and to P. Bernus et al. (eds.

Proposta de integração de parceiros na formação e gerência de empresas virtuais.

“…Neste ponto, vale ressaltar que uma metodologia necessita comportar os seguintes componentes (WILLIAMS et al, 1995):…”

A Vision of Enterprise Integration Considerations

“…In order to answer the challenge of these open issues, technical and so-called non-technical included, it identified two types of Enterprise Reference Architectures (Williams, 1996c;, Type 1 and Type 2. In terms of the connectivity concern discussed previously, the Type 1 Architectures describe the architecture or physical structure of some component or part of the integrated system such as the computer system or the communications system.…”