process integration

Automation technology moved into factories by the end of last century. Since then, production processes have changed dramatically worldwide. While companies first focused on optimizing interdepartmental collaboration, today the cross-company collaboration increasingly comes into focus. After all, in a globalized economy companies need to operate in networks. In order to cooperate efficiently and effectively in global supply chains, transparent structures and standards are indispensable. This applies first and foremost to the logistics.

Optimized and efficient business processes are increasingly understood to be the key elements of competitive enterprises. The so far separated functionalities of modelling, execution, integration and analysis of business processes undergo currently a strong trend of convergence - this will lead to a new product type. These new systems will enable companies to put their business process model into the centre of their IT-landscape, to manage them process-centrically and to perform a successive transition to the Real-Time Enterprise due to the consideration of process data within the process model.

Modern enterprises are continuously advancing the IT-based realization of interconnected, world-wide engineering processes between customers, manufacturers, suppliers, and other engineering partners. But, available solutions are supporting this kind of enterprise and process integration as well as the integration of product data inadequately. Regarding this, at the Department of Computer Integrated Design (DiK), TU Darmstadt, appropriate solutions were developed. The derived solutions are enabling enterprises domain-independently to form effective virtual networks of organizations and to optimize processes of collaborative engineering. This can be done by simultaneously improving the magical triangle of time, costs and quality efficiently.