334,572 research outputs found
Open source ERP for SMEs.
For the last decade or so, the biggest category of the IT investment has unarguably been Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Most of the bigger corporations in the developed countries have implemented ERP systems with an aim to achieving competitive edge in their respective business areas. Now that the top end of the ERP market has been saturated, the main interest has moved to non-commercial sectors such as universities and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These organisations have not been able benefit directly from the ERP revolution because an ERP implementation requires huge resources and entails high risks.
Over the same period, the concept of Open Source Software (OSS) has been enthusiastically adopted by the software engineering community. OSS has excelled in many systems software domains, for example, operating systems with Linux and web servers with Apache. Having observed these successes, the software industry has been showing interest in application domains such as enterprise information systems, more specifically ERP systems, as the next OSS candidates. In this paper, we outline the challenges as well as opportunities of OSS ERP development
Developments in participatory methods for software development
Paper presented at ICT confrence of 2006This paper briefly discusses the concept of Participatory design. Whereas the embodying
research is in software engineering and development of large enterprise information
systems, this paper discusses the general concepts of participation from a perspective of a
developing country’s possible gains from embracing this methodological approach. In line
with the theme of the conference “Emerging technologies and trends and the future of ICT
Sector in Kenya” the content is abridged to reflect the wide spectrum of the audience in
the conferenceThis paper briefly discusses the concept of Participatory design. Whereas the embodying research is in software engineering and development of large enterprise information systems, this paper discusses the general concepts of participation from a perspective of a developing country’s possible gains from embracing this methodological approach. In line with the theme of the conference “Emerging technologies and trends and the future of ICT Sector in Kenya” the content is abridged to reflect the wide spectrum of the audience in the conferenc
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A modular product structure based methodology for seamless information flow in PLM system implementation
Product development process deals with large amount of information generated from market survey, concept design, manufacture, test, limited production, production, service, and obsoleting. The information should be stored systematically so that it is easily traceable and reusable for future product development. This paper presents a methodology for seamless product information flow between the three main enterprise information systems such as Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), Product Data/Lifecycle Management (PDM/PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) used in the process of innovative product development while implementing PLM. PLM implementation deals with various existing product data and information generated over years both from CAD and ERP systems. Data integration is very challenging in multi-national engineering companies and has important impact on future decisions while creating new processes. The aim is to define a modular product structure that can be used to connect the product information throughout the life cycle that can be reused effectively and efficiently for future similar products
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Towards a methodology for the development of integrated IT infrastructures
In this paper, the authors propose and validate
a methodology for the development of integrated
Information Technology (IT) infrastructures. The
motivation for putting forward a new methodology is
grounded on the limitations of the various software
engineering methodologies (traditional) that exist
today. Despite that the traditional methodologies result
in the development of Information Systems (IS) from
scratch, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
builds integrated IT infrastructures using existing
applications. This significant difference is associated
with many issues needed to be realised and addressed
like: (a) the changes that such an infrastructure brings
to organisations, (b) the resistance to change and (c)
the extension of IS lifecycle’s. The proposed
methodology consist of eight stages and aims at
supporting software engineers, organisations and
researchers to build integrated IT infrastructures. As a
result the methodology seeks to contribute to the body
of knowledge
IT Systems Development: An IS Curricula Course that Combines Best Practices of Project Management and Software Engineering
Software Engineering in IS Curricula Software engineering course is taught to higher education students majoring in Computer Science (CS), Computer Engineering (CE), and Software Engineering (SE). Software engineering course is also taught in other disciplines, either as a mandatory or as an elective course, such as Information Systems (IS). IS is a broader field than CS and includes parts of CS. IS fie ld could be described as an interdisplinary field that studies the design and use of information systems in a social context. As noted in IS2002 model curricula (Gorgone et al., 2002) , IS as a fie ld of academic study exists under a variety of at least thirteen (13) different curricula, including Information Systems, Management Information Systems, Computer Information Systems, Information Management, Business Information Systems, Informatics, Information Resources Management, Information Technology, Information Technology Systems, Information Technology Resources Management, Accounting Information Systems, Information Science, and Information and Quantitative Science. The author\u27s early experience was that teaching IS students a software engineering course in the same way as CS students was not successful. This is mainly because IS students have significantly less background in programming than CS students. This experience encouraged him to accommodate topics on project management and SE best practices lab using Rational Suite Enterprise (Rational Suite Enterprise, 2008). This new approach was relevant to IS curricula and with accordance with IS2002.10 project management and practice course guidelines. Hilburn, Bagert, Mengel, & Oexmann (2008) proposed that several computing associations including the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the IEEE Computer Society (IEEECS), and the Computer Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) have provided encouragement, support, and guidance in developing quality curricula that are viable and dynamic. However, most computing programs still devote little time to software life cycle development, software processes, quality issues, team skills, and other areas of software engineering essentials to effective commercial software development. Hence, new graduates know little about what are best practices in software engineering profession (e.g., practices related to use of software processes, team building, front-end development). Therefore, it is the role of faculty members teaching such courses to redesign and implement curricula that focus on practice of software engineering, and other related issues. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents arguments for the alternative approach. Section 3 presents IS2002.10 course specifications. Section 4 presents IS software engineering body of knowledge. Section 5 presents the project component, Section 6 presents a mapping from IS2002.10 course specification onto the IS software engineering course. Section 7 presents evaluation of the proposed approach. Finally, conclusions are presented in Section 8. Why IT Systems Development Course? We have taught the IT Systems Development course to IS students for seven years, and we believe we hit upon an approach that works. Instead of trying to instruct students in theory of various techniques, we teach them what we believe of as software development. From the management side IS students are expected to deal with non-technical challenges arising from project situations, including understand project domain and requirements, how to be a team player, how to schedule work between team members, and how to cope with time pressures and hard deadlines. As indicated by (Weaver, 2004), students often have limited experience in projects management. They do not appreciate the need for planning and take more time than anticipated to complete tasks. We have developed the creation of a set of guidelines for accommodating topics on project management to help students deal with non-technical issues of software development.
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Requirement driven knowledge management system design to support automotive product development
Nowadays, New Product Development (NPD) has become a business priority in manufacturing companies due to international competition in terms of meeting higher and changing customer requirements, generating high profit at low cost, and maintaining sustainable development and growth. Through literature review and industrial investigations, it has been recognised that NPD is an information and knowledge intensive process. However, in current practice, enterprise knowledge is not properly managed or easily accessible. Many service providers have not followed the good practice of considering business objectives and end users’ requirements as main drivers of knowledge management system development and implementation.
This doctoral thesis presents a methodology for the design and development of Knowledge Management (KM) systems to support NPD based on Enterprise Architecture Frameworks (EAFs). The project focuses on IT system specifications
generation driven by business and knowledge users’ requirements in the automotive industry. Current EAFs have been developed by researchers and practitioners to help enterprises to design their information systems based on business objectives and user requirements. However, these frameworks are mainly proposed to manage information and data such as finances, resources, management and engineering
documents, not for the increasingly important enterprise knowledge, especially tacit and unstructured knowledge.
This project aims to extend the capabilities of the latest enterprise architecture frameworks so that not only data and information, but also enterprise knowledge can be managed. A guideline in the form of a flowchart has been developed, which provides a process that can be followed and used by system developers and implementation. The extended EAF has been implemented as easy-to-use folders for the development of a structured knowledge base. A case study in an automotive company proved that the methodology can be used to produce the functional specifications of their IT systems to include knowledge management capability. The system specification can then be used, either to assess a company’s existing information systems and direct its future system development and implementation; or to develop/implement a complete new information system from scratch
On Modeling and Analyzing Cost Factors in Information Systems Engineering
Introducing enterprise information systems (EIS) is usually associated with high costs. It is therefore crucial to understand those factors that determine or influence these costs. Though software cost estimation has received considerable attention during the last decades, it is difficult to apply existing approaches to EIS. This difficulty particularly stems from the inability of these methods to deal with the dynamic interactions of the many technological, organizational and projectdriven cost factors which specifically arise in the context of EIS. Picking up this problem, we introduce the EcoPOST framework to investigate the complex cost structures of EIS engineering projects through qualitative cost evaluation models. This paper extends previously described concepts and introduces design rules and guidelines for cost evaluation models in order to enhance the development of meaningful and useful EcoPOST cost evaluation models. A case study illustrates the benefits of our approach. Most important, our EcoPOST framework is an important tool supporting EIS engineers in gaining a better understanding of the critical factors determining the costs of EIS engineering projects
Enterprise analysis of factors contributing to technical change
Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 91-93).Engineering change management (ECM) is an essential but challenging cross-functional discipline within modern product development firms. ECM is best explained as a discipline because no single process can characterize the complex interactions between stakeholders, processes, information systems, knowledge management practices and cultural factors that enable the control of technical design change. One major challenge to product development projects is gaining actionable a priori insight into the risk of technical design change in order to allocate resources to mitigate specific risks. This thesis employs systems thinking skills to identify and analyze corresponding a priori factors within a product development firm that designs large complex systems. A case study framework provides qualitative ECM analysis from an enterprise perspective with supporting empirical stakeholder interview data. Furthermore, the research design employs more than 7,000 design defects from three large system development programs to experiment with data-mining models for classifying and predicting technical defects. This research reveals some ECM risk factors and corresponding enterprise policies in the context of process, information, and stakeholder interactions. This study also offers both executable and conceptual quantitative defect models that are appropriate for proactive risk mitigation within specific ECM processes. Ultimately, this holistic analysis provides policy recommendations for the selected enterprise, and identifies factors that have general implications for contemporary industry.by Matthew T. Knight.S.M.in Engineering and Managemen
IDEF5 Ontology Description Capture Method: Concept Paper
The results of research towards an ontology capture method referred to as IDEF5 are presented. Viewed simply as the study of what exists in a domain, ontology is an activity that can be understood to be at work across the full range of human inquiry prompted by the persistent effort to understand the world in which it has found itself - and which it has helped to shape. In the contest of information management, ontology is the task of extracting the structure of a given engineering, manufacturing, business, or logistical domain and storing it in an usable representational medium. A key to effective integration is a system ontology that can be accessed and modified across domains and which captures common features of the overall system relevant to the goals of the disparate domains. If the focus is on information integration, then the strongest motivation for ontology comes from the need to support data sharing and function interoperability. In the correct architecture, an enterprise ontology base would allow th e construction of an integrated environment in which legacy systems appear to be open architecture integrated resources. If the focus is on system/software development, then support for the rapid acquisition of reliable systems is perhaps the strongest motivation for ontology. Finally, ontological analysis was demonstrated to be an effective first step in the construction of robust knowledge based systems
Managing knowledge for capability engineering
The enterprises that deliver capability are trying to evolve into through-life businesses
by shifting away from the traditional pattern of designing and manufacturing successive
generations of products, towards a new paradigm centred on support, sustainability and
the incremental enhancements of existing capabilities from technology insertions and
changes to process. The provision of seamless through-life customer solutions depends
heavily on management of information and knowledge between, and within the different
parts of the supply chain enterprise.
This research characterised and described Capability Engineering (CE) as applied in the
defence enterprise and identified to BAE Systems important considerations for
managing knowledge within that context.
The terms Capability Engineering and Through Life Capability Management (TLCM),
used synonymously in this thesis, denote a complex evolving domain that requires new
approaches to better understand the different viewpoints, models and practices.
The findings and novelty of this research is demonstrated through the following
achievements:
Defined the problem space that Requirements Engineers can use in through-life
management projects.
Made a contribution to the development of models for Systems Architects to
enable them to incorporate ‘soft’ systems within their consideration.
Independently developed a TLCM activity model against which BAE Systems
validated the BAE Systems TLCM activity model, which is now used by UK
Ministry of Defence (MoD).
Developed, and published within INCOSE1, the INCOSE Capability
Engineering ontology. Through the novel analysis of a directly applicable case study, highlighted to
Functional Delivery Managers the significance of avoiding the decoupling of
information and knowledge in the context of TLCM.
Through experimentation and knowledge gained within this research, identified
inadequacies in the TechniCall (rapid access to experts) service which led to the
generation of requirements for an improved service which is now being
implemented by BAE Systems.
The results showed that managing knowledge is distinct when compared to information
management. Over-reliance on information management in the absence of tacit
knowledge can lead to a loss in the value of the information, which can result in
unintended consequences. Capability is realised through a combination of component
systems and Capability Engineering is equivalent to a holistic perspective of Systems
Engineering. A sector-independent Capability Engineering ontology is developed to
enable semantic interoperability between different domains i.e. defence, rail and
information technology. This helped to better understand the dependencies of
contributing component systems within defence, and supported collaboration across
different domains. Although the evaluation of the ontology through expert review has
been accomplished; the ontology, KM analysis framework and soft systems
transitioning approach developed still need to undergo independent verification and
validation. This requires application to other case studies to check and exploit their
suitability.
This Engineering Doctorate research has been disseminated through a number of peer
reviewed publications
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