Within CIME environments, one continually comes across a multitude of different working practices, network devices, information systems and manufacturing technologies. This heterogeneous environment extends to individual enterprises and can have profound effects on the efficiency and effectiveness of an organisation, and often results in symptoms such as: long product lead times, poor visibility of the product and process status, high product inventory and work-in progress, low data integrity, etc., as well as incurring excessive infrastructure costs. Having to select an appropriate information system to help achieve the business objectives of anyone manufacturing enterprise can be an awesome task. During the 1980s, vendor-independent communications such as MAP (Manu facturing Automation Protocol) and CNMA (Communications Network for Manufacturing Applications) brought standard, open communications to computer controlled industrial devices, but this alone was not enough to satisfy the more demanding requirements of creating and maintaining manufacturing applications. In order to create manufacturing solutions that effectively utilise Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) it is necessary to look beyond the standard communications protocols to how and why applications are developed.
