Supporting enterprise design through multiple views

Manufacturing enterprises must satisfy customers’ needs, in order to sustain their position in the competitive market. This requires the enterprises to continuously design and produce new products. To handle new product introductions or changes to existing product ranges, enterprises must modify or re‐design their processes. Enterprise design and implementation is very expensive and time consuming. Hence, application of modelling techniques can be beneficial, first to avoid mistakes, which may result in loss of market position, and secondly to test alternative designs with minimum cost. Modelling a complex manufacturing enterprise requires a great amount of varied information. Thus, efficient collection and assessment of information are key factors in successful design. This paper introduces a multi‐view support tool, called Factory Design Process Views (FDP Views), which aims to facilitate the capture, evaluation, access and modification of all the information required by designers and management during an enterprise design.