CIMOSA - News
Vol. 4/4, date 97-09-20
Editor. M. Zelm, Gehenbuehlstr. 18A, D-70499 Stuttgart
Announcement:
The CIMOSA - News is published by the CIMOSA Association. The CIMOSA News will report on CIMOSA applications, evolution of its technical specification, advancements in standardisation and related items. Contributions from other parties are welcome. The
CIMOSA - News will be printed periodically and is also available in the internet at the dedicated WWW server http://cimosa.cnt.pl/News/
Contents
The 'International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modelling
Technology' to be held in Turin on Oc-tober 28-30 is jointly supported by the
EU and the USA. A wide span of topics on enterprise integration (EI) will be
presented. The agenda covers views on current and future developments in EI
as seen by academia, indus-trial users and vendors, EI basic concepts and
papers from relevant ESPRIT, IMS and USA projects. A major section of the
conference is dedicated to reports from the five ICEIMT workshops. 12 papers
will present the results from the different working groups which all resulted
in proposals for projects related to enterprise integration. A special
session will allow to get partici-pants involved in discussions on the
individual propos-als, which may lead to the start-up of collaborative
re-search projects. The conference proceedings - printed by Springer-Verlag -
will be available at the conference.
A demonstration of advanced modelling
and simulation tools, which support enterprise integration will provide an
opportunity for discussions, personal contacts and collection of specific
information material. The follow-ing tools will be demonstrated: ARIS, CILT,
FirstSTEP, PrimeObjects, SIMPLE++ with the modelling front-end VICTOR.
Additional tools are under negotiation.
For further information and conference registration see
http://www.mel.nist.gov/workshop/iceimt97
This workshop will present the outcome of the ICIEMT'97 conference and the
results of the previous workshops on different aspects of enterprise
integration. It aims to further consolidate issues in enterprise
inte-gration, make recommendations for future R&D work-programmes and discuss
and recommend way's of dis-seminating the results of ICEIMT'97 to potential
users and vendors (with special reference to SMEs).
For information contact CIMOSA Association e.V.
The workshop marked the endpoint of a one-month research period at Rotterdam
with participants from the US and Europe. 24 participants from 7 countries
at-tended and contributed to the results of the workshop. The event was
jointly sponsored by the EU-TELEflow project, the EU Telematics Application
Programme, the European Agility Forum, the CIMOSA Association, the Erasmus
MBA/MBI Programs and the Centre for Man-agement of Co-operation at the
Erasmus University.
Key results :
- Visible of the multi-facetted bottom-up approaches towards the virtual
enterprise all over Europe and be-yond. Co-operation among these isolated
activities could give real leverage to this spreading new paradigm.
- General agreement on the essence of the virtual enter-prise: to manage
change proactively. There is a need to develop the dynamic business models as
well as the theoretical foundations of the virtual enterprise and metrics of
change.
- Virtual enterprises are contingent on their structural and cultural
environment. This resulted from the intense discussions between participants
from the US, Latin America and Europe on their experiences. An unambi-guous
message from this discussion is that Europe has to identify and develop its
own approach(es) to the virtual enterprise that gives a competitive leverage
to its eco-nomic structure in the global economy.
Empirical cases: contributions to the workshop were based on empirical cases
and ongoing projects like:
- Global competence networks, strategically lead by a focal company or by
governmental agencies,
- co-operation of suppliers in their regions of Bra-bant/Netherlands,
Scotland/UK, Lake of Con-stanze/Germany-Switzerland, Prato/Italy and in Latin
America,
- co-operation of companies in their industries such as the environmental
industry, the IT industry or the flower industry.
The cases showed different trajectories in the formation of the virtual
enterprise: One group represents networks that have been incited by
University activities or gov-ernmental funds with the objective to stimulate
eco-nomic development. As the discussions showed, these networks face the
challenge to generate sustainable commitment among the companies to continue
the en-gagement after funding has expired. A second trajectory towards the
development of networks is the strategic intent of a focal company to create
the network and to intensify co-operation in the supplier network. A third
trajectory of network development was reported as in-tensified co-operation
of peer companies with broad objectives, with no explicit strategic centre,
Change processes are concurrently effective on the level of the network, the
company, the team, and the individ-ual. Change will affect the formation and
re-formation of the network as well as the dynamic re-configuration of
projects within the network. Learning Processes are interactive processes of
mutual adaptation between indi-viduals who co-operate in teams and the
network they are embedded in. Agility requires the competency of
Introspection, which is the capability of the virtual en-terprise to reflect
on its dynamic change processes in order to manage change.
Ongoing activities in Europe: The workshop created a strong motivation among
the participants to intensify co-operations. Ongoing and future activities,
which are open for participation as well as the workshop proceed-ings are
online documented
(see http://www.nectar.org/update/proceedings/97082101/index.htm
or b.katzy@fac.fbk.eur.nl).
A preliminary list of future research topics will be
refined by the European work-shop on virtual organisation. This workshop will
publish its findings at the European Conference on Digital Commerce, Genoa
1998.
The research project DARIF
(see http://www.darif.fh-offenburg.de),
the German acronym for 'Methods and Tools for
Decentralised Work and Infor-mation Structures based on Business Processes'
funded by the German ministry of research and technology has developed a
framework of methodologies to improve integration through enterprise
modelling, communica-tion analysis and intranet-based information systems
suited for SME's. The framework contains three major concepts, which serve as
general methodologies to im-prove enterprise integration :
- Enterprise modelling with CIMOSA and dynamic simulation of the enterprise
processes and activities based on Petri-Nets, enables modelling of actual and
alternative business situations.
- A concept for communication analysis and diagnos-tics allows to model
communication as process steps with input and output information exchanged
be-tween people. Target is to detect bottlenecks or missing links in the
enterprise communication.
- An information system to provide process and prod-uct knowledge, expert
knowledge and support pri-vate communication in an enterprise intranet.
Em-ployees can retrieve on-line enterprise information. Additionally, the
system provides the means for written communication with messages, mail and
pictures. Emphasis is on easy to use and visualised representation of the
information.
The status of the activities at both the research institutes and the user
SME's has been presented at an open work-shop in Offenburg on July 10/11. It
has been demon-strated that the usage of enterprise models in the day-to-day
operation can improve the manufacturing flexibility, reduce operation costs
and generate the agility more and more required in the business environment.
The imple-mentation of the total framework of methodologies is still under
development and will be completed by the end of the DARIF project (1998).
GIP (Gestión e Ingeniería de la Producción) is a Spanish research group
involved in R&D and education at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
(UPV). In the course of the research work CIMOSA has been used as the
methodology for enterprise integration. A Partial Model has been developed
for a build-to-stock environ-ment in metal parts production, and a Particular
Model for the order management process in a company distrib-uting electrical
components.
In the Partial Model five domains have been defined (CIMOSA: Order
Management, Planning, Scheduling, Non-CIMOSA: Manufacturing and Supply
Manage-ment). The main objective of this project has been to develop a first
approach of an Integrated Partial Model which can be used to develop further
particular models with reduced effort. For the company distributing
elec-trical components, a BPR project has been developed in the Order
Management Process, from which a CIMOSA Particular Model has been built.
The GIP group is working on a CIMOSA Learning Tool (CILT), a Multimedia
Tutorial Tool, to enable a fast and thorough understanding of the CIMOSA
concepts. The tool will be shown at the ICEIMT'97 Conference
For more information contact aortiz@omp.upv.es
- October 28/30
-
'International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modelling Technology
1997' ICEIMT'97 Conference in Turin/Italy
- November 27
-
'Increasing International Consensus in Enterprise Integration' ICEIMT
Workshop Brussels, EU Congress Centre
- November 26/27
-
'DARIF Expert Forum', FZK Karlsruhe
A two days seminar on CIMOSA covering enterprise modelling and integration, tools and
modelling applica-tions with demonstrations as well as standardisation. For more
information contact K. Kosanke.
'CIMOSA - a primer on key concepts, purpose and busi-ness value', provides an
overview on enterprise model-ling, applications and business benefits.
'CIMOSA - Open System Architecture for CIM', Technical Baseline, Version 3.2; CIMOSA Association e.V., 96/02/15. A hypertext version of the Business Modelling part of the Technical Baseline is available.
The CIMOSA Association is involved in promotion of CIMOSA, its active support in
national, European and international standardisation and in consolidation of the
evolution of its technical specifications. Members of the CIMOSA Association are
industrial and research organisations involved in exploitation of CIMOSA or interested in
the subject of enterprise integration (EI).
www-cimosa@cnt.pl, 28.09.1997 (last update: 28.09.1997)