The purpose of this project is to promote and standardize a general, object-oriented framework for manufacturing. Business objects are a very broad class, of which manufacturing objects are only a part. However, manufacturing plays a major role in the economy. Every business is a consumer of manufactured products, and many businesses are in manufacturing. As a result it is important that a CIM framework be closely integrated into any larger business or enterprise framework.
Successful integration is based on well-defined and widely accepted interfaces.
Thus the object-oriented approach with its emphasis on interface specification is well adapted to integration. The more difficult question is how to specify what an interface does, without overly constraining possible implementations. We suggest that this is significant problem for this workshop to address. These stages are in logical order, but generally their execution will overlap to a large degree. Results from any one stage will feed both backwards and forwards to the other stages.