The strategic design and development of enterprise resources planning and real-time monitoring systems

One of the crucial requirements of global manufacturing strategy is the ability to optimise the use of information technology. This paper describes a process to implement manufacturing strategies that are consistent with a particular company's overall business strategies and results with conceptual system architecture. A methodology is proposed and used to identify and implement an integrated manufacturing strategy which consists of two major horizons: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and a Real-Time Monitoring system (RTMS). RTMS, which can provide up-to-date information for the planning and scheduling of manufacturing orders, monitoring quality, improving communication and increasing productivity, is implemented and is integrated with an ERP system. The architecture of the ERP system is designed for a global manufacturing environment. The implementation was designed with a Distributed Object-Oriented Technology which increases the system scalability, configurability, flexibility and interoperability. The ERP is designed to support real-time data collection and processing for all required production and inventory analysis with a flexible architecture which can meet the distributed business requirements.