Business Intelligence

Today, the increasing pace of development makes the task of Business Intelligence urgent and difficult at the same time. However, companies being pressurized by their day to day affairs do not feel up to facing this task themselves. Especially in small and medium enterprises an effective solution is needed to make sure that they see changes approaching before they are overtaken by them, so that they can react quickly and competently. With this need in mind, the present paper focuses on changes brought about by technological innovations and offers a solution which has been developed in a project involving a company engaged in medical engineering. The core element of the developed proposal is the decentralization of foresight. Therefore information is being gathered, passed upwards and thereby evaluated by a hierarchy of managers, called “radar groups”. Such perspective allows essential feedback to the capabilities of a company on all levels. In sum this leads to a new thesis ...

State of the Art IT-solutions for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM-solutions) offer no support for decision makers in the early phases of product engineering. Their focus is rather on the administration of design data. This article describes a concept for the advancement of PLM-solutions. Existing approaches in Business Information Management are being discussed and extended to allow their application in the PLM-context. Fundamental idea of the described concept is a role, task and process oriented guidance of decision makers. Finally the strategy of realisation is outlined and an outlook on major potentials of realisation is given.

This article presents an overview of a transformable Factory Cockpit that supports all aspects of decision making in factories from short term operations to long term strategies. It integrates elements of classical Business Intelligence Systems with methods of Virtual and Digital Factories. Hereby, it provides small and medium sized companies with real time transparency regarding production performance and enables rapid development and evaluation of alternative configurations of the production system. The prototype will be implemented in September 2008.