The common model of an enterprise's value objects, presented in relevant business views

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to report on the experiences from four linked product structuring cases at large Swedish companies involving substantial concept modeling. Case by case will be described in brief, and we will discuss how the experiences from previous case add to the next. The main issues have been: one business view of the product dominates information access, the terminology and communication. We will discuss the value of having one common product model and unified terminology that is accepted in all processes adding value to the product. The modeling method will be discussed, including the way of working when many contributors must be on the arena. The paper analyzes the fact that what is supposed to be very company/product unique objects/relations, in fact often are generic. The most recent case introduces context as an object into an already complex product structure. © 2009 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.