Developing an integration framework to support the information flow between PDM and MRP

Integrating various kinds of business application has attracted much attention in the business to business (B2B) market. The integration of the production planning functions and engineering design functions is an important area which has been addressed recently by some major enterprises. This paper proposes a methodology to support the integration of information flow between the applications of product data management (PDM) and manufacturing resource planning (MRP). A three-level structure including model development, model analysis, and system implementation was developed. An approach applying the concepts of semantic similarity to find the "common" objects used in different business applications was also proposed. These objects were used as a buffer for the information integration. In addition, a set of business rules was developed to govern the information flow between PDM and MRP. The proposed methodology has been implemented by integrating two commercial PDM and MRP software modules.