A system planning method based on templates for large-scale manufacturing information systems

In the ®eld of manufacturing, there is a need to develop large-scale manufacturing information systems. This is especially true in the Japanese steel manufacturing industry where CIM is the core management technology. But developing such systems requires large amounts of time and manpower, and furthermore, these type of projects are very dif®cult to manage. Therefore, in order to ease the process of analysis and design, we propose procedures based on a two-dimensional template with speci®c criteria for large-scale manufacturing IS architectures. In each manufacturing system, there are two important elements that correspond to the two dimensions of the template. One is a functional category and the other is a management structure. We show here the effectiveness of applying this method to system planning of large-scale IS in one representative steel manufacturing plant. # 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.