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...