An Enterprise Data Management Framework for Agile Manufacturing

The successful company of the future must understand how people really work and how technology can help them work more effectively. It must know how to create an environment for continuous innovation on the part of all employees. A successful company must rethink traditional business assumptions and tap needs that customers do not even know they have yet. The purpose of Data Management Framework is to provide a seamless enterprise data management solution in support the future Agile Manufacturing environment. A Data Management Framework can be defined as the ability of an enterprise to manage and distribute data, information, and knowledge as the decisive enabler for core enterprise business processes. Integration of current fragmented computer systems, causing over-complexity, is perhaps the biggest challenge the Agile Manufacturing Enterprise faces. Each computer system can act as an isolated island of fragmented product data. This will result not only in high additional ‘product’ infrastructure costs but also in high ‘opportunity costs’ as in forgone sales and profits. Evidence shows that treating the causes of over-complexity can result in double-digit improvement on, return on sales, but managers must question the familiar, traditional patterns of decision making that give rise to the complexity in the first place. The role of technology must be redirected toward helping the enterprise improve its market share by reducing the cost of manufacturing; enhancing product quality; increasing responsiveness to market demands; and supporting the manufacturing evolution to an Agile Manufacture. A Data Management Framework is a means for promoting data, information, and knowledge as an enterprise resource. This framework is a high level planning and management map of the manufacturing data, information, and knowledge needs of the Agile Manufacture. Productivity, responsiveness, and quality will be improved by the creation of a consistent unambiguous business language (data, information, and knowledge) required to run the Agile Manufacturing environment. This Data Management Framework will share enterprise data which means that there will be a sole source of data and all authorized users (e.g., Engineering, Manufacturing, Material, Financial,...) will share data directly without translation.