A framework to integrate manufacturing information systems

Information systems play a critical role in today's manufacturing business, and the need for enterprise-wide integrated information system has grown rapidly. Although there are different integration approaches reported in the published literature, in today's industrial practice, most of the information system integration projects are still done on a trial-and-error basis owing to the lack of practical and feasible integration methodologies. This research proposed an integration framework which provides a logical and structured methodology to tackle information systems integration problems in real-world manufacturing environments. The framework is driven by the corporate strategy of manufacturing enterprises. The 'Decomposing-and-Mapping' method, normally used in the engineering axiomatic design approach, has been utilised here in a novel setting to design an integrated manufacturing information system.