ISO 9000 Papers

Key-words- A1 System definition

Ab-stract- If your organization is is typical, you are being asked to take greater control of a wide variety of information processing resources - PCs, workstations, midranges and networks. Why? Because corporate IS has already proven its ability to manage complex technologies efficiently, effectively and with an eye to corporate profitability. Now that heterogeneous departmental systems have proliferated, your enterprise is relying upon you to bridge these isolated pockets of automation, to make sense of these disparate technologies and fulfill the promise of computer-based information sharing

Key-words- Performance Measurement

Ab-stract- These days, you're probably being asked to service more and more end users on an expanding variety of systems and network platforms and these end users are demanding better response time and availability. And this can be quite a challenge, since your budget is expected now to stretch beyond the glass house and assimilate isolated workgroup and departmental systems.

Key-words- pm benchmark f/nf

Ab-stract- A framework for measuring the value-adding capability of an entire manufacturing chain is described. The framework provides a means of benchmarking organizational performance irrespective of market-related profit margin. The method of analysis provides a measure of existing value-adding capability as well as guidance for investment, constraint removal and measurement of the new state. The measure of untapped potential available in an organization allows for benchmarking against world-class standards. The methods could also be used to aid company share evaluation since the relative improvement potential can be measured as intercompany comparisons become available. Graphs, References

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Ab-stract- Presents a comparison review between executive information systems from Comshare Inc. and Pilot Software Inc. Reports that Pilot's Lightship ($NA) was preferred by users in a Computerworld survey over Comshare's Commander/EIS ($NA). Says Lightship is a Windows-based program and scored higher than Commander/EIS in six of seven of the most highly-rated categories. Says Lightship was most highly rated in hot spot and drilldown capabilities, which provide greater programmability with new mathematical, string and relational functions. Cited Lightship's strength as its user friendliness and flexible customization. Its biggest weakness was slow performance. Notes that Commander scored highest in graphical reporting, and also was lauded for its flexible graphical user interface. However, it was criticized for weak documentation. Lightship rated a 6.9 out of ten in the survey, Commander a 6.5. Includes four graphs.

Key-words- Concurrent Engineering, Product Development, Automation, Time to Market.

Ab-stract- Company must transform the five forces of change: technology, tools, tasks, talent, and time into well-managed resources for product development. The concurrent eingineering environment is defined in terms of four key dimensions: organization, communication infrastructure, requirements, and product development. Furthermore a plan is fien for automation as will as an assessment tool to determine the right concurrent engineering approach to a specific company.

Key-words- object-oriented views process activity resource model petri nets

Ab-stract- This paper discusses the integration of structural, functional, and control knowledge in manufacturing workcell modeling, simulation, and design. After an overview of applications of semantic and object-oriented data models in the manufacturing domain, issues relating to the control synthesis for manufacturing workcells are presented. In particular, a data model encompassing functional and control features, along wiht application domain structural knowledge is developed. This model assists in explicitly representing the control aspects of engineering design within an object-oriented database and supports a task-level functionality driven manufacturing workcell design. Since manufacturing workcells consist of a number of elements interating in a complex manner, workcell control design is one of the most difficult steps in the workcell design procedure. This paper will explore the incorporation of Petri Nets as a basis for describing application control knowledge within a structure-function-control data model.

Key-words- LEW2 process modelling benchmarking.

Ab-stract- The increasing interest in benchmarking as a tool for achieving radical improvements in a business' competitive performance has encouraged many companies to attempt a comparison of their performance to that of others. This has been attempted in two main ways. Companies who compare their performance to that of their competitors restrict their potential operating improvements to a position of higher equality with the competitor, who may have by then moved on. Those companies attempting to look into other industries to gain real originality may fail if they do not focus on activities which are directly comparable. This paper looks at the need to identify the correct activities to study and proposes a modelling technique which can help the company to establish a baseline for comparison.

Key-words- BPR

Ab-stract- There is always a better way to run your business. Business Process Re-engineering can help you identify how to do just that.

Key-words- A1 Evaluation Performance Measurement IDEF0 SOA

Ab-stract- The study of manufacturing systems has generated interest in IDEF0, a structured functional analysis technique for manufacturing. The paper comprises a review of relevant published literature. Four categories of publications have been identified: descriptions and reviews of the basic principles of IDEF0; performance evaluation and comparisons with other techniques; enhancements to the technique; and specific applications. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues raised as a result of the review, identifying general agreement that there is a need for such a technique and that it provides a basis for understanding and analysing manufacturing systems.

Key-words- Business Decision Strategic Performance Measurement

Ab-stract- This article describes a study of the business strategies and performance levels of firms with entrepreneurial and conservative strategic postures. Data were collected from the senior executives of 111 small manufacturing firms. Results indicate that entrepreneurial firms differ from conservative firms in terms of their growth rates as well as several financial, operating, and marketing-related variables. The data suggest that the patterns of strategic behavior associated with high performance are different for entrepreneurial and conservative firms.

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Key-words- A1 IDEF.

Ab-stract- The various forms of structured analysis have been used successfully for several years. They have brought rigor and clarity to software specifications. They do have shortcomings when applied to business reengineering. This paper presents comparisons of SA and IDEF in several important areas.

Key-words- eis

Ab-stract- Competitive intelligence systems are systematic process systems created to help organizations formulate better strategic decisions. Investing in a competitive intelligence system provide various advantages to the independent agent. These benefits include providing a vital input into the strategic decision-making process, developing strategic vision, making comparisons of competing products and services and modifying strategies to keep in pace with competitors.

Key-words- A1 Srategic.

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Key-words- architecture model view.

Ab-stract- We present a framework for enterprise engineering that encompasses the formalization of knowledge in an enterprise, its integration into a software tool, and the visualization of the enterprise. The foundation for the system is the use of generic ontologies for enterprise modeling.

Key-words- Perf-meas

Ab-stract- In the United States, manufacturing performance has usually been determined through the use of various "local" performance criteria. For example, a machine operator is evaluated on how many parts he produces compared to the standard; a supervisor is evaluated on his departmental efficiency; and a plant manager is evaluated on his plant utilization. These types of performance measures are local criteria, since they only assess the performance of a small part of the manufacturing process within the organization. Due to the complex organization structures of U.S. industry, most executives use these measures to assess the overall "global" performance of the organization. The belief has been that if all personnel and departments are being utilized efficiently, the overall organization success in maximized. We will briefly describe the evolution of performance measures and review why productivity improvement programs frequently fail in the United States. We provide a hypothetical example comparing local versus global performance and an actual example of conflicting performance measures. We discuss the various shortcoming and dimensions of performance measurement systems. The use of local productivity measures to direct the long-term success of the organization must be eliminated; an organization's success can only be assured by concentrating on global system-wide performance.

Key-words- A15 Project Planning.

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Key-words- A4 Justification Evaluation Strategy

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Key-words- model oo.

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Key-words- Process Redesign Reeingineering Cost Drivers

Ab-stract- The re-engineering of business processes must be a basic requirement for continuous improvement. Focusing on business processes allows one to deal with all of the relevant issues and provides a framework for applying appropriate tools and techniques. In addition, no dimension of a firm's strategy, structure, processes, technology, or culture can be applied effectively in isolation.

Key-words- BPR IT Tman Strategy

Ab-stract- The strategic use of information technology (IT) is now and has ben a fundamental issue for every business. In essence, IT can alter the basic nature of an industry. The effective and efficient utilization of IT requires the alignment of the IT strategies with the business strategies, something that was not done successfully in the past with traditional approaches. New methods and approaches are now available. The strategic alignment framework applies the strategic alignment model to reflect the view that busienss success depends on the linkage of business strategy, organizational infrastructure and processes and IT infrastructure and processes. In this paper, we look at why it may not be sufficient to work on any one of these areas in isolation or to only harmonize business strategy and inforamtion technology. One reason is that, often, too much attention is placed on technology, rather than business, management, and organizational issues. THe objective is to build an organizational structure and set of busienss processes that reflect the interdependence of enterprise strategy and IT capabilities. The attention paid to th elinkage of IT to the enterprise can significantly affect the competitiveness and efficiency of the business. The essential issue is how information technology can enable the achievement of competitive and strategic advantage for the enterprise.

Key-words- A3 A4 Decision Criteria Framework Modeling

Ab-stract- This paper develops a hierarchical, multi-objective programming framework for decision support, analysis, and design of CIM systems. we demonstrate that each component of CIM, and CIM as a whole, is associated with conflicting objectives such as maximizing quality, profit, productivity, and flexibility. Realizing these objectives and finding appropriate ways to state and resolve their conflicts can play a major role in the development of CIM systems. We begin with an overview of hierarchical decision making as related to the time domain, and sime important components of CIM as related to automation. We then relate manufacturing databases and the structure of decison support systems considering multiple and conflicting objectives.

Key-words- o-o view.

Ab-stract- Today the modeling of an enterprise is enabled by various methods which are used for different putproses and views upon th eenteprise. Using an object-oriented approach the Integrated Enterprise Modeling (IEM) concept will integrate different modelling views in one consistent manufacturing enterprise model and will provide a modelling base for construction of an enterprise model from a user's point of view. It will lead the user from a general CIM architecure given by predefined model structures to a particular model and architecture ofthe system support in his own manufacturing enterprse which are the essential tasks towards an enterprise wide and integrative usage of information technology. Therefore the basic constructs like obkect class structure and a related process description mehods via the generic activity model will be presented. The kernal and hte main views of a manufacutring enterprise model will be derived. An example using the IEM concept for the specific view of CIM planning and introduction will clarify the main features of hte concept. A comparison with CIMOSA project will be done.

Key-words- ABC, LEW.

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Key-words- Measurement Weighting

Ab-stract- This paper examines difficulties with the use of weights to solve multiple objective decision support models: misunderstanding of the meaning of weights, issues of commensurability and, most of all, the likely inability of weights alone to isolate the decision maker's most-preferred point. The e- constraint method is shown to be an attractive alternative.

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Key-words- A1 A4 Evaluation Implementation Justification Strategic FMS

Ab-stract- The implementation of manufacturing technology in American industry has lagged the advances made in recent years. The absence of adequate analysis and justification methods is a fundamental problem in dealing with investment decisions of this scope and complexity. But even when the justification barrier is overcome, some problems remain, as evidenced by the failure of several installed flexible manufacturing systems to produce at a desired level of output. The preponderance of evidence in the literature and case studies suggests that justifying and tracking manufacturing systems is a complex task that requires consideration of many tangible and intangible decision factors. Previously developed methods usually focus on subsets of factors measured strictly in monetary-based terms. A comprehensive methodology that systematically identifies the relevant decision factors and incorporates them in a procedure to indicate the value of the system to the user is presented. Strategic, tactical, and operational decision factors are systematically identified, scaled, and aggregated into four measures of value to the user--namely suitability with respect to strategic planning, capability, performance, and economic productivity. Features of the method include the analysis of manufacturing systems from several vantage points which allows problem isolating comparisons to be made; adaptability to both justification planning studies and postimplementation tracking analysis; and implicit and explicit risk evaluation.

Key-words- Decision analysis AHP Multiple Criteria

Ab-stract- Decisions on adopting new manufacturing technologies are often biased because they are based only on those impacts that can be expressed in financial terms. Multi-criteria decision tools that include nonfinancial impacts avoid this bias. One such tool, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), has been modified for the manufacturing environment and incorporated into AutoMan, decision support software for microcomputers. The modified AHP is used here to decide on the best way to automate a machine shop. The four steps are: (1) specify criteria and alternatives; (2) weight criteria using pairwise comparison judgements; (3) rate alternatives with respect to criteria; and (4) compute the overall weighted score for each alternative.

Key-words- Intelligent Product Information Sharing COncurrent Engineering ISO 10303.

Ab-stract- In the 90's we are awakening to the realization that to survive in a global economy, we must change our design and manufacturing policies and practices. We must take steps to streamline our processes so that we can shorten the cycle time from concept to production and produce goods that are superior at the lowest possible cost.

Last Modified: Friday, April 09, 1999

Additions, comments, or problems, please let me know at whitman@imfge.twsu.edu