Inter-enterprise architecture as a tool to empower decision-making in hierarchical collaborative production planning

© 2015 Elsevier B.V.The novel idea of inter-enterprise architecture from the enterprise engineering perspective allows collaborative networks to integrate and coordinate different organizations. Therefore, inter-enterprise architecture offers multiple benefits, including: joint process harmonization, business strategy and information technology alignment, technological cost reduction, risk and redundancies reduction, customer services improvement and enhanced responsiveness. Inter-enterprise architecture can be used to solve the different issues that collaborative networks face on a daily basis. A conceptual model that addresses the problem of unexpected events management in the context of hierarchical production planning to improve decision-making in collaborative environments is proposed using inter-enterprise architecture. The proposed conceptual model is composed of a framework, a modeling language and the methodology. The conceptual model has been applied to a Spanish collaborative network from the ceramic tile sector.