Enterprise Integration and Information Architecture

A Systems Perspective on Industrial Information Integration

Li Da Xu

• Editore: Auerbach Publications
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781498759953
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Information Management

Enterprise solutions have emerged as promising tools for integrating and extending business processes across business functions. Supplying a clear and comprehensive introduction to the field, this book provides a detailed description of enterprise information integration-from the development of enterprise systems to extended enterprise information

1

Introduction

1.1 Modern Enterprise Solution

During the last two decades, the complexity of enterprises has grown dramatically. In particular, increasing product varieties, market globalization, and the expected quick responsiveness to market changes all require enterprises to be more agile and responsive. Today’s enterprises are struggling to meet those challenges. One approach to meeting such challenges is the leveraging of advanced information technologies as global economic integration requires more rapid information sharing.

Information technology is revolutionizing information systems within enterprises, particularly the networking, communication, and control systems. It provides the means for enterprises to better integrate their intra- and interorganizational business processes, activities, and resources. Intraorganizational integration requires the enterprise to build a set of consistent and mutually supportive practices that can support the enterprise’s goals and objectives. Interorganizational integration matches those goals and objectives with the needs of the market and with the enterprise’s competitive needs (within the existing environmental constraints). Intra- and interorganizational integration support and complement each other. In many enterprises, both intra- and interorganizational integration are needed to realize the enterprise’s objectives.

To achieve integration, efficiency, competency, and competitiveness, many enterprises have a strong need to build enterprise systems (ESs) that can manage their existing business processes and operations. By definition, ESs are software packages that are developed to support many aspects of an enterprise’s information needs (Davenport, 2000). “Enterprise systems” refer to large-scale software systems that are developed for the seamless integration of material and information flows within an organization. Qi et al. (2006) define an enterprise information system (EIS) as an integrated information system that seeks to integrate every single business process and function in the enterprise to present a holistic view of the business within a single information technology architecture.

In general, an ES is composed of a suite of different modules. Typical modules include executive direction and support, customer integration, engineering integration, manufacturing integration, and support service integration (Langenwalter, 2000). An enterprise can make its ESs available by integrating a number of modules.

It is well recognized that ESs have an important long-term strategic impact on the organizations that adopt them. Many large companies have adopted ESs to support their global business operations and supply chain management (SCM). For example, global operations have forced enterprises such as Dell and Microsoft to adopt ESs in order to take advantage of the global supply network. Meanwhile, many small enterprises have also adopted ESs to facilitate their business operations. So far, ESs have become a basic information processing requirement for many industries. As a result, the ESs market has become one of the fastest growing and most profitable areas in the software industry.

1.2 Emergence of ESs

Today’s business environment is a collaborative one. Due to the intense competition in the business environment, enterprises need to establish relationships with various stakeholders and collaborate with their business partners and customers in order to survive and stay competitive in the marketplace. Collaboration can take place in a variety of forms. In general, collaboration includes intra- and interenterprise business collaboration. However, supporting intra- and interenterprise business collaboration is difficult, since enterprises and their partners may be located in different places. To effectively support collaboration, many enterprises have recognized the need to build an integrated ES by integrating their processes within the enterprise and also with external enterprises in order to conduct business (Browne et al., 1995). Thus, integrated ESs such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) have been used by many enterprises to support intra- and interorganizational business collaboration. By definition, integrated ESs are designed to integrate different enterprise functions and are used by different user groups and departments in and across organizations. They have the capability to significantly improve the operational performance of enterprises and enterprise collaboration. By linking databases, applications, and systems across enterprise networks, integrated ESs can provide real-time and accurate enterprise-wide or supply chain–wide information to enterprises.

Due to the benefits brought by integrated ESs, many enterprises have been using various information technologies to implement integrated ESs and to link disparate data sources, applications, and systems within their enterprise and beyond their enterprises. Many successful ESs have been implemented and used in manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, telecommunication, logistics, and SCM.

However, realizing these benefits requires a lot of effort. Some enterprises have had very successful implementation, while others have not achieved the results that they anticipated to gain from ESs (Li et al., 2008a). It is well recognized that implementing an integrated ES is a complex process. It often takes years and a large team of people to implement such systems. There can be many challenges during the implementation process. For example, many enterprises use a large number of disparate heterogeneous applications to run their businesses. To share information between these heterogeneous systems, technical work is required to create an integrated ES so that different applications can interact with each other. As different applications often use different programming languages, protocols, and operating systems, integrating these applications can be time-consuming and technically challenging. Furthermore, enterprise collaboration involves more than technical integration and often requires process integration between enterprises in order to realize effective communications and collaborations. During the process of implementing an ES, enterprises often need to change their business processes and tasks, change hierarchical levels of their organizations, and build further relationships with clients and suppliers. For example, enterprises in supply chains often need to collaborate with customers, suppliers, distributors, financial institutions, and government agencies and seek their support to implement a successfully integrated ES.

Research indicates that many strategic, financial, managerial, and technical benefits can be leveraged if stand-alone and disconnected information systems are replaced by integrated information systems (Xu, 2011). ESs can be used to support different types of collaboration in a typical business life cycle. The following are some examples (Ho and Lin, 2004):

• Product life cycle collaboration
• Engineering project collaboration
• Customer order and inventory collaboration
• Distributor–reseller collaboration
• Supplier and procurement collaboration
• Demand planning collaboration
• Warehouse management and freight collaboration

As noted earlier, different enterprises often have different information systems and applications built upon different technologies (Liu et al., 2008). Due to the constant evolution of information technologies, many enterprises have installed hardware and software from third parties (such as software vendors) and have used them to build their systems. Many applications are also distributed across a number of business units and are deployed on heterogeneous platforms. These hardware parts, software parts, and applications need to be updated regularly to ensure that they are secure and efficient. The vast varieties of hardware and software and their upgrades can often complicate the integration problem and can make integration challenging because there is always a complexity about whether an integrated system will be able to communicate with the existing systems of the enterprise or with the systems of its partners. ESs also have to be implemented in environments with certain existing legacy applications. To bridge the so-called information islands seamlessly, ESs need to be integrated with other application systems or commercial software packages. However, many commercial software packages hide their data formats and processing transactions completely behind the interfaces. To integrate these applications, ES developers need to have sophisticated knowledge and a solid understanding of the information infrastructures. This can make integration a challenging task (Wang et al., 2005).

Despite the difficulty in developing integrative ESs, research and development on integrated ESs has received a lot of att...

Indice dei contenuti

• Preface
• Author
• Chapter 1 - Introduction
• Chapter 2 - Enterprise Integration
• Chapter 3 - Extended Enterprise Integration in Supply Chain
• Chapter 4 - Enterprise and Supply Chain Architecture
• Chapter 5 - Information Architecture for Enterprise and Supply Chain: A New Discipline of Industrial Information Integration
• Chapter 6 - Enterprise Process Modeling and Workflow Management
• Chapter 7 - Enterprise Information Integration Modeling and Integrating Information Flows
• Chapter 8 - Industrial Information Integration
• Chapter 9 - Systems Approach to Industrial Information Integration
• Chapter 10 - Future Evolution