A reusable enterprise model

Enterprise activities are intricate, as companies often produce multiple product families which require a complex mixture of production modes. Modelling techniques are commonly applied to expose the behaviour of an enterprise and to investigate the feasibility of achieving business objectives. However, enterprise modelling can be a slow process and models become invalid if business objectives are changed, because their information content may be overtaken by fast changing market conditions. The modelling process is accelerated if new models can use part or all of the information from previous models. This paper addresses these issues by introducing a reusable enterprise model, called a factory data model (FDM). It has been implemented using an object‐oriented approach, and contains five key class hierarchies. The model can be specialised to meet the requirements of individual enterprises; hence, less time and effort are involved in creating new models to satisfy changes in enterprise requirements.