Abstract Enterprise resource planning systems, if implemented successfully, can bestow impressive strategic, operational and information-related benefits to adopting firms. A failed implementation can often spell financial doom. Currently, most of the information about the failures and successes are based on reports on implementations in large manufacturing and service organizations. But enterp...

Planning that incorporates critical resource and part constraints due to manufacturing processing as well as material handling tolerance and kinematic requirements has not been reported in the existing literature. By integrating these manufacturing resource and part constraints using object-oriented design, our new operations planner creates immediately executable manufacturing plans for flexib...

This paper presents work carried out within the ‘ExPlanTech’ project (IST-199920171) funded in part by the European Commission's Information Technologies Programme. The mission of the ExPlanTech technology transfer project is to introduce, customize and exploit the multi-agent production planning technology (ProPlanT multi-agent system research prototype) in two specific industrial enterprises....

ERP systems are widely used by large enterprises for managing functional areas of the enterprise. However, recently ERP systems have also been introduced to the small enterprise market. ERP systems are now considered an important small enterprise management aid that may contribute to the sustainability and growth of the small enterprise. Although there are several acceptance factors that may im...

Recently, manufacturers have been challenged with the growing demand for highly personalized products and services. A major obstacle for developing this complex offer has been a manufacturer’s capability to assess resource requirements in the value creation network. This paper presents the impact of such an offer on key processes and it discusses our initial investigation towards a novel resour...

One of the key design issues for distributed systems is to find proper planning and coordination mechanisms when knowledge and decision capabilities are spread along the system. This contribution refers holonic manufacturing execution systems and highlights the way a proper modeling method – Petri nets – makes evident certain problems that can appear when agents have to simultaneously treat mor...

While discrete event simulation technology holds tremendous promise and has a strong and established background, manufacturing industry has been less than successful in the implementation of simulation as a decision support tool. This paper reports on research into developing simulation into a sustainable desktop resource to be used continuously by various manufacturing personnel as a decision ...

Strong competition in the manufacturing industry makes efficient and effective manufacturing processes a critical success factor. However, existing warehousing and analytics approaches in manufacturing are coined by substantial shortcomings, significantly preventing comprehensive process improvement. Especially, they miss a holistic data base integrating operational and process data, e. g., fro...

Software agents have been increasingly used in the product and process development in industry over the past years due to the rapid evolvement of the Internet technology. This paper describes agents for the integration of conceptual design and process planning. Agents provide mechanisms to interact with each other. This mechanism is important since both of those processes involve negotiations f...