A model based architecture for time to market reduction and product optimisation

摘要

While there is an increasing number of enterprises that are changing their business operations from a functional approach to a process-oriented approach, enterprise modelling is perceived as a necessary step to perform this change.Current modelling technology allows the use of enterprise models to go far beyond descriptive purposes; in fact, such models can play a major role in defining and managing business processes and in mapping business processes to support systems such asworkflow systems.Enterprise models can be used for different purposes, but it is important to observe that, at least, they act as a repository that semantically organises the knowledge about the enterprise; this knowledge can be used to, reach specific objectives, bymeans of suitable tools.Models describe processes, their interactions, their relationships with the Organization and the information system and provide qualitative and quantitative results during the whole life cycle of the process' in prototyping. enactment. monitoring anddocumentation.But, building effective enterprise models is difficult as it requires handling a large number of classes which are needed to express the functional, information, Organization and resource views and managing a complex hierarchical architecture where manyinteractions take place between subsystems.Making such models operational is even more difficult because execution mechanisms have to be associated with the modelling constructs.The paper presents a methodological and architectural approach to enterprise integration and a technique for building operational enterprise models.