Title: Design and implementation of an object-oriented information management system

Authors: H.C.W. Lau, C.X.H. Tang, G.T.S. Ho, C.K.M. Lee

Addresses: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Hong Kong. ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Hong Kong. ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Hong Kong. ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Hong Kong

Abstract: Competitive advantage is gained through operational excellence strategy while quality decisions, reviews and plans facilitate the production of quality products through the adoption of best practice as well as reduction of minimal waste and downtime. Efficient data collection with high accuracy is one of the key success factors to generate quality information, which has sufficient ability to transform data into economic value. However, inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the information life-cycle, including activities such as collect, store, use, analyse and share data, are often the common sick symptoms for most organisations. In general, the enterprises spend too much unnecessary resource on data collection and storage, and less on facilitating data analysis and sharing. This paper demonstrates how to analyse, design and develop an object-oriented information management system to re-engineer and improve the existing problems of inefficient data and information flow. In addition, it supports the data and information analysing technique to facilitate the decision-making and manufacturing process improvement. A case study on a manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprise has been conducted with promising results to validate the feasibility of the approach.

Keywords: business intelligent systems; database management systems; object-oriented systems; online analytical processing; OLAP; information management; information flow; decision making; process improvement; small and medium-sized enterprises; manufacturing SMEs; information systems; data analysis; information sharing; data exchange.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2007.013357

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2007 Vol.28 No.2/3, pp.195 - 208

Published online: 22 Apr 2007 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article