Enterprise Engineering:
An Information Systems Perspective

Enterprise Integration Laboratory
Department of Industrial Engineering
University of Toronto
4 Taddle Creek Road
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A4
tel: +1-416-978-6823
fax: +1-416-971-2479
email: msf@ie.utoronto.ca

INTRODUCTION

Market competition is forcing firms to reconsider how they are organized to compete. As a basis for change, they are explorinf a variety of concepts, including Time-based Competition, Quality Function Deployment, Activity-Based Costinf, Quality Circles, Continuous Improvement, Process Innovation, abd Business Process Re-Engineering. Regretably, most of the concepts are descriptive, if not ad hoc, and lack a formal model which would enablr their consistent application across firms. Consider business process re-engineering[Davenport 93], [Hammer &Champy 93]. It is very much in the "guild" mold of application; management consultants are the "masters" and they aimpart their knowledge through "apprenticeship"to other consultants. The knowledge of business process re-engineering has yet to be formalized and reduced to engineerinf practice.

The goal of the Enterprise Engineering Project at the University of Toronto sis to:

  1. Formalize the knowledge found in Enterprise Engineering perspectives such as Time-based Competition, Quality Function Deployment, Activity-Based Costing, Quality Cirsles, Continuous Improvemtn, Process Innovation, and Business Process Reengineering. By formalize, we mean the identification, formal representation and computer implementation of the concepts, methods and heuristics which comprise a particular perspective. This not only enables a precise formulation of the intuitions implicit in practice, but ut us also a step towards automation the execution.
  2. Integrate the knowledge into a software tool that will support the enterprise engineering function by exploring alternative organization models spanning organization structure and behaviour. The Enterprise Engineering system allows for the exploration of a variety of enterprise designs. The process of exploration is one of design, analysis and re-design, where the system not only provides a comparative analysis of enterprise design alternatives, but can also provide guidence to the designer.
  3. Provide a means for visualizing the enterprise from many of the perspectives mentioned aboce. The process of design is performed through the creation, analusis and modificaiton of the enterprise from within each of the perspective visualizations.

In the remainder of the paper we first provide an overview to the Enterprise Engineerinf system architecture. We the describe each component in detail. Lastly,we describe th status of our implementation.

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