Enterprise design information: the key to improved competitive advantage

Changes occur very quickly within competitive business environments, and successful companies need to respond quickly by producing and delivering improved products and services, or by changing their business strategies and operational systems. Such changes may require redesign of resources, processes, strategies or organizational structures within the enterprise. Redesign is an expensive and risky process. This paper reports on how information models, databases and support tools, can be used to reduce uncertainty, by modelling the desired enterprise, and predicting its performance, before costly physical implementations are undertaken. Thus, management can gain valuable insight into the potential efficiency and performance capabilities of the redesigned enterprise, and minimize the risks associated with change. An overview is provided of an information-centred, multi-view design system to facilitate and accelerate the design or redesign of manufacturing enterprises. The design system includes both an information model, to store details of the proposed enterprise, and multiple design tools to support both the building and evaluation of the model. The design tools enable the model to be viewed in different ways, thus emphasizing and clarifying particular aspects of the design, and enabling the potential performance of the designed enterprise to be predicted.