Enterprise engineering is the body of knowledge, principles, and practices used to design all or part of an enterprise. An enterprise is a complex socio-technical system that comprises people, information, and technology that interact with each other and their environment in support of a common mission. One definition is: "an enterprise life-cycle oriented discipline for the identification, design, and implementation of enterprises and their continuous evolution", supported by enterprise modelling. The discipline examines each aspect of the enterprise, including business processes, information flows, material flows, and organizational structure. Enterprise engineering may focus on the design of the enterprise as a whole, or on the design and integration of certain business components.
Overview
Several types of enterprise engineering have emerged.
In engineering, enterprise engineering covers a wide variety of activities. Encompassing "the application of knowledge, principles, and disciplines related to the analysis, design, implementation and operation of all elements associated with an enterprise. In essence this is an interdisciplinary field which combines systems engineering and strategic management as it seeks to engineer the entire enterprise in terms of the products, processes and business operations,". this field is related to engineering management, operations management, service management and systems engineering.
In software development, enterprise engineering deals with the modelling and integration of various organizational and technical parts of business processes and functions. In information systems development, this has become an area of activity for the organization of systems analysis, and an extension to the existing scope of Information Modelling. It can also be viewed as an extension and generalization of the systems analysis and systems design phases of the software development process. Here, enterprise modelling can form part of the early, middle and late information system development life cycle. Explicit representation of the organizational and technical system infrastructure is being developed in order to understand the orderly transformations of existing work practices. This discipline is also known as Enterprise architecture, or along with Enterprise ontology, defined as being one of the two major sub-fields of Enterprise architecture.
Methods
Enterprise engineering involves formal methodologies, methods and techniques which are designed, tested and used extensively in order to offer organizations reusable business process solutions:
Design & Engineering Methodology for Organizations
Computer Integrated Manufacturing Open Systems Architecture (CIMOSA) methodology
Integrated DEFinition (IDEF) methodology
Petri Nets
Unified Modeling Language (UML) or Unified Enterprise Modeling Language (UEML) Enterprise function diagrams (EFD)
These methodologies, techniques and methods are all more or less suited to modeling an enterprise and its underlying processes.
Design & Engineering Methodology for Organizations
DEMO is a methodology for designing and engineering of organizations. Central concept is the "communicative action": communication is considered essential for the functioning of organizations. Agreements between employees, customers and suppliers are indeed created to communicate. The same is true for the acceptance of the results supplied.
The DEMO methodology is based on the following principles:
The essence of an organization is that it consists of people with authority and responsibility to act and negotiate. The modeling of business processes and information systems is a rational activity, which leads to uniformity. Models should be understandable for all concerned. Information should 'fit' with their users.
The DEMO methodology provides a coherent understanding of communication, information, action and organization. The scope is here shifted from "Information Systems Engineering" to "Business Systems Engineering", with a clear understanding of both the information and the central organizations.
Computer Integrated Manufacturing Open Systems Architecture
CIMOSA provides templates and interconnected modeling constructs to encode business, people and information technology (IT) aspects of enterprise requirements. This is done from multiple perspectives: Information view, Function view, Resource view and Organization view. These constructs can further be used to structure and facilitate the design and implementation of detailed IT systems.