چارچوب به اشتراک گذاری داده برنامه ریزی منابع سازمانی (ERP) با استفاده از مدل محصول عمومی (GPM)

Nowadays, all product life cycle processes are investigated deeply in order to get an advantage over competitors. To support these processes, several software applications are available. However, this wide range of heterogeneous applications leads to a large variety of hardware and operating systems, data management software, data models, schemas, and data semantics that hinder the information sharing process. To tackle this problem, Hitachi Company has developed a modeling language called Generic Product Model (GPM) in addition to several translators from native formats to GPM for storing, sharing and visualizing product data in a single data warehouse. In order to broaden the range of application data able to be stored and shared using the GPM data warehouse, this paper presents a methodology and a translator that allow management data to be included in a GPM data warehouse. Given the fact that most management data are stored in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, and that the latter allows extraction of database contents into Excel files, we propose a translator that handles Enterprise Resource Planning management data that are already extracted into Excel Format. The proposed framework enables data management contained in flat Excel Files to be translated into structured GPM data. Translation methodologies are given for the translation of mass production and customized product data through two case studies, one in the computer retail sector and the other in the extrusion machine industry.

Due to financial, technological and environmental constraints, all the steps of the product life cycle management are nowadays deeply analyzed and optimized. Experts can rely on software applications dedicated to each specific field to support this activity. The variety of domain needs and development approaches to tackle a problem have led to the development of a large number of applications and formats which often have limited compatibility between each other. This heterogeneity becomes problematic as soon as people want to share data and information within a company or between different companies. These difficulties hinder collaborative efforts during the design, the management and the end-of-life steps of a product. To improve data sharing, different methods and tools have been developed, such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), ETL tools (Vassiliadis et al., 2005 and Vassiliadis et al., 2001) and web-based part libraries (Li, Lu, Liao, & Lin, 2006). However, these solutions have some limitations as outlined in Section 2. To circumvent these limitations, the Japanese Hitachi company has proposed translating data from several CAD/CAM application fields into a single and long lasting format, called the Generic Product Model (GPM), based on STandard for Exchange of Product model (STEP), which can then be visualized in a web browser. This paper proposes a methodology for storing and sharing management data in a structured manner by designing and developing new translators between ERP data and the GPM structure. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, a state of the art of the different technologies and works in data sharing and exchange, with a particular focus on ERP, is presented. According to this, motivations for developing new information sharing techniques are described. Section 3 details the GPM concept and the different features on which the current development relies. Section 4 is dedicated to the presentation of the global platform TECHNOINFRA that hosts the different data and application layers. The structure of exchanged ERP data as well as the design and development of the information translator are addressed in Sections 5 and 6, respectively. Two implementation cases are presented in Section 7: a fictitious computer manufacturing company and a real Swiss manufacturing company in extrusion machine building. Conclusions are finally provided in Section 8.

In this paper, the focus is put on translation, storage and sharing of initially flat management data which are characterized by a huge variability among companies that may cooperate by storing and sharing data in a common data warehouse. A framework for structuring, sharing and exchanging ERP data and information is presented and discussed from the technical as well as from the user points of view. Depending on the kind of data a user may deal with, a methodological approach is proposed for developing a semi-automatic mapping in order to translate unstructured and proprietary management data into a structured and generic modeling language on the basis of the Generic Product Model. Furthermore, the developed architecture and its supporting language are independent from any prior technical choice in ERPs development or integration. The case studies show that this architecture is able to cope with simple products as well as with complex product systems through the use of their generic bill of materials and bill of materials. Moreover, the adopted approach allows to easy drag and drop data mapping, without prior database knowledge, makes its use accessible for a large community of users, decreases development costs and ensures that mapping can quickly be adapted in the case of modification of any data source structure, without changing the kernel of the system.