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Lean Six Sigma Basics
Published in James William Martin, Lean Six Sigma for the Office, 2021
Workflow management (WM) systems began to evolve from simple electronic versions of manual work tasks to advanced adaptive systems that dynamically reconfigure a process to match capacity with demand by modifying business rules and work sequences. Earlier versions included Excel spreadsheets and customized software written for specialized applications. A next step in the evolution of technology began when users wanted to integrate diverse IT platforms, including software and hardware systems, to reflect geographically dispersed workflow configurations. Initially, these activities were at a local level but are now integrated into internet-based applications accessed using online portals. These integration activities are called enterprise application integration (EAI).
Information Technology Ecosystems
Published in James William Martin, Operational Excellence, 2021
Previous issues that inhibited the implementation of EAI included lower-level incompatibilities between application programming interfaces (API) and conflicting programming models and client APIs among some EAI platforms. Legacy systems to be integrated also made integration difficult because of security clearances or an inability to create new user accounts or support new APIs. To the extent EAI can be deployed within a global supply chain, its benefits include workload balancing, asynchronous messaging, distributed communications, and business process application sharing as well as access to and sharing of disparate databases. EAI systems support BPMS as well as BMA, BI, BMA, and workflow management.
Big Data, Semantic Web, and Collaborative Business Process Engineering (CBPE)
Published in Unhelkar Bhuvan, Big Data Strategies for Agile Business, 2017
EA provides the “organizational policy” in terms of how SOA (made up of Web services) is to be used by the various information systems of the organization. Thus, the implementation of EA leads to what is called enterprise architecture integration (EAI). An EAI plays an important role in enabling collaborative business processes.
EOS: enterprise operating systems
Published in International Journal of Production Research, 2018
Joseph Rahme Youssef, Gregory Zacharewicz, David Chen, François Vernadat
Going one step further than CORBA, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) platforms are integration frameworks made of a collection of technologies and services to provide integration of systems and applications that reside on different operating systems and use different database solutions across an enterprise (e.g. SCM applications, ERP systems, CRM applications, payroll …) (Linthicum 1999). An EAI architecture is typically based on four components including a centralised broker (or hub) that handles message routing, security services, communication services and connectors. The latter are used to interface each application to the EAI hub so that it can communicate with the other applications. The EAI approach focuses on enterprise application integration by means of normalised message exchange (preferably XML). It was not dedicated to enterprise operations monitoring and control as foreseen for EOS. In addition, EAI products are based on tight integration approaches, leading to so-called monolithic architectures, rather than on loosely coupled interoperability, which is more suited for EOS because of its agile nature (i.e. components can be easily added, removed or modified in the architecture).
Industry 4.0: state of the art and future trends
Published in International Journal of Production Research, 2018
Integration, consolidation and coordinated applications have been identified as a critical issue in the Industry 4.0 environment. The boundaries of individual factories will most likely fade away. Factories in different industrial sectors and different geographical regions will be interconnected or integrated. Most probably, an enterprise will have some existing legacy systems that it intends to continue to use, and meanwhile, it will add a new set of applications to the operation. To address the integration of new and existing applications, an ICT solution, which is referred to as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) (Yu and Madiraju 2015; Gorkhali and Xu 2016) can be applied. In order to integrate the new CPS-based digital capabilities with existing architectures, systems and processes, the coordination of various systems and applications greatly depends on EA, EI and EAI. Weber has pointed out that one of the important issues surrounding Industry 4.0 is the fact that existing equipment is not capable of communicating with newly deployed technology (Weber 2016). This obstacle can be overcome by Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) system, which is created with different methods and on different platforms, and aims at connecting the current and new system processes, providing a flexible and convenient process integration mechanism. The integration of enterprise applications includes the integration of heterogeneous data sources, processes, applications, platforms and standards. Through creating an integrative structure, EAI connects different systems and applications both intra-organizationally and inter-organizationally. By combining software, hardware, and standards, EAI makes sharing and exchanging data and information seamlessly possible (Xu 2011), which is required by Industry 4.0. A complete EAI offers functions such as process integration and information integration which will be introduced in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3.
Towards flexible RFID event-driven integrated manufacturing for make-to-order production
Published in International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2018
Xifan Yao, Jianming Zhang, Yongxiang Li, Cunji Zhang
In order to take the most advantage of RFID and EDA to integrate planning and scheduling with real-time control, an efficient framework is required to aggregate them as a whole. In the early days of CIM (computer integrated manufacturing), or Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI), there was a tight coupling between the integrated applications which made it difficult to response to changes in a make-to-order production system. As a new model of EAI that fosters service-orientation in support of a service-oriented enterprise, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables the development of applications that are built by combining loosely coupled and interoperable services (Morgan and O’Donnell 2017). By using service-oriented technology such as SOA and cloud computing as a means of integration, a so-called SOA4CM (SOA for Cloud Manufacturing) was proposed (Yao et al. 2012). By integrating CEP, EDA and SOA4CM, a so-called EDSOA4CM (Event-Driven SOA4CM) (Yao et al. 2013) was proposed to meet such a need for IoT-enabled manufacturing. While traditionally CIM or EAI tends to be data centric, EDSOA4CM more emphasises on business processes. High-level languages such as BPEL and specifications such as WS-CDL and WS-Coordination extend the service concept by providing a method of defining and supporting orchestration of fine-grained services into more coarse-grained business services, which users can incorporate into workflows and business processes implemented in composite applications. LISA, a service-based and event driven architecture with flexibility and scalability, was proposed for rapid integrating varied devices and services (Theorin et al. 2016). Based on the work (Yao et al. 2011; Zhang, Yao, and Zhang 2015; Yao et al. 2013), this study further investigates RFID-enhanced manufacturing that integrates planning, scheduling, and control through an EDSOA framework, more specifically RFID event-driven integrated production planning and control (RED-IPPC) framework, which is exemplified by the case study of make-to-order production, and flexible job-shop scheduling problems monitored by CEP are presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework in detail. The rest of this paper is organised as follows: Section 2 describes the integrated framework; Section 3 gives the approaches to deal with planning, scheduling and control; Section 4 analyses and defines RFID-related events in MSs; Simulation with Arena is given in Section 5; Section 6 presents the experiment of RED-IPPC; and Section 7 concludes the paper with a prospect of future work.