Information Integration in Maintenance and Design Processes: A Modeling Effort

This paper describes an effort to generate and evaluate alternative potential improvements to a vehicle design process. Our approach focused on the analysis of the documents used in the vehicle design process. Understanding these documents and the rules and assumptions underlying them allowed us to find the outmoded parts of the process. Challenging the rules and assumption underlying the documents lead us to two solutions, each with a different kind of process and information integration, and enabled by different degrees of technology. We used simulation to compare the redesigned processes and the original process. The simulations predicted that the redesigned processes would result in considerable cost and time savings over the original process. The simulations also gave detailed predictions on the relative merit of each redesigned process which allowed us to evaluate the usefulness of the different degrees of technology. We first describe the overall process and the document flows. Then we describe our rationale for business redesign including a discussion of information and process integration. We outline the two redesigned processes and describe the modeling and analyses we performed to evaluate the designs. Finally, we consider all three designs with respect to information integration. Across the current process and the two redesigns we find there is a shift from information integration by document integration to information integration by process integration.