Integration of a Manufacturing Resource Planning System with a Manufacturing Information Repository

Abstract

This work employs a Systems Engineering approach to integrate two heterogeneous databases systems in a chemical manufacturing facility. The first system is a Manufacturing Resource Planning system (MRPII) which supports production planning and control. The second system is a Manufacturing Information Repository (MIR) that manages and stores information concerning processes, equipment and materials. Phase I of this project compared the data structures of the two systems for common data fields. With very little commonality found, Phase II focused on the interrelationships and intra relationships of the data structures of the two systems and yielded the following results: 1) Detailed data models of the two systems that showed the MIR system to be hierarchical and the MRPII system to be relational; 2) A set of mapping conventions between the corresponding data fields of the two systems; 3) An algorithm and a computer program to upload information from the MIR to the MRPII system. To demonstrate the computer program, a case study was performed using sample MIR data.