Architectures, Methods and Tools for Enterprise Engineering

In today's highly competitive global economy, the demand for high quality products manufactured at low costs with shorter cycle times has forced a number of manufacturing industries to consider various new product design, manufacturing, and management strategies. Recently, due to the rapid advances in Information Technology (IT), new paradigms have successively emerged such as CIM, JIT, lean manufacturing, Concurrent Engineering, Business Process Engineering and more Enterprise Engineering (EE). Enterprise modeling is currently in use either as a technique to represent and understand the structure and behavior of the enterprise, or as a technique to analyze business processes, and in many cases as support technique for business process reengineering. However, EM architectures and methods for Enterprise Engineering has also to cover the integration of quality, information system, cost , human and organizational aspects and to has to support the Enterprise Engineering process from goal and requirements definition up to implementation and operation [9]. This paper provides an overview of architectures, methods and tools for Enterprise Engineering. It then points out substantial results achieved so far as well as presents a methodology and a related tool in more detail, which supports all phases and aspects of Enterprise Engineering .