A holistic approach to manufacturing systems modelling

The success (or mere survival) of today's enterprises depends on their managers making correct decisions to rapidly align organisational processes toward meeting and exceeding ever-changing needs and wants of the customer. In order to be successful managers need integrated information systems capable of supporting them throughout the decision-making lifecycle. These systems should be capable of using a wide variety of models along with the most current data and information stored in distributed locations, managed as critical organisational assets. This paper presents a holistic approach to such a manufacturing systems-modelling paradigm using a structured description capture method, called IDEF0.