ERP data sharing framework using the Generic Product Model (GPM)

Nowadays all product life cycle processes are investigated deeply in order to get an advantage over competitors To support these processes several software applications are available However this wide range of heterogeneous applications leads to a large variety of hardware and operating systems data management software data models schemas and data semantics that hinder the information sharing process To tackle this problem Hitachi Company has developed a modeling language called Generic Product Model (GPM) in addition to several translators from native formats to GPM for storing sharing and visualizing product data in a single data warehouse In order to broaden the range of application data able to be stored and shared using the GPM data warehouse this paper presents a methodology and a translator that allow management data to be included in a GPM data warehouse Given the fact that most management data are stored in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software and that the latter allows extraction of database contents into Excel files we propose a translator that handles Enterprise Resource Planning management data that are already extracted into Excel Format