Enterprise Integration has become a synonym for improving the business operation of the enterprise and thereby increasing flexibility and improving competitiveness. Before reaching this ambitious goal, several steps need to be completed. Firstly, user friendly tools have to become available on the market to support enterprise modelling, simulation and decision making as well as the exchange of models. Secondly, a common understanding of the modelling language and the methods for model engineering must be further developed and will then ultimately become an industry standard.
In order to take advantages of enterprise modelling and simulation, enterprise models have to be kept up-to-date continuously. Since only the people directly involved in the business have the knowledge on operational needs and required changes, model up-date and maintenance has to become a normal task in the daily business of the operational staff rather than of modelling specialists. Therefore enterprise modelling methods and tools have to be easily usable by manufacturing people.
The ultimate goal of enterprise engineering is the model driven monitoring and control of the enterprise operation for the continuous management of change. This implies the use of models during the entire system life cycle and includes updates and maintenance of models.
The goals and visions of enterprise integration are quite clear. The full implementation of all pre-requisites may still take several years, but a lot of valuable validation results, pilots and prototype applications are already available supporting the business user to improve the productivity of his enterprise today. The CIMOSA Association will actively support this process by promoting enterprise integration creating awareness in the industry and supporting standardisation efforts as much as possible.
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www-cimosa@cnt.pl, 2.03.1996 (last update: 02.03.1996)