Knowledge management system for implemententing integrated management in Romanian industry.

Carutasu, George ; Botezatu, Cezar ; Botezatu, Cornelia Paulina 等

1. INTRODUCTION

In case of management systems, the necessity of integration derive from large efforts needed to be made in order to assure effective tools used to manage large organization. So, as history, in 60', in the management subsystems were considered decisional subsystem, financial subsystem, IT subsystem and human resources. In the next years, quality has gained more importance and as consequence a QA (Quality Assurance) has been added. In this case experts, procedures, equipments, and information used in order to guarantee that of products and services quality is achieved. These systems, named nowadays "quality management systems" appeared as a consequence of deep changes in science and technology, initially for the aerospace, nuclear and military industry. After 1990, the quality management systems have been extended to the machine tools industry, electronic, computers, motor vehicles, and after 2000 they were also designed for services, public services included.

After 1990, environmental management systems have appeared and these systems allow the enterprise to adopt environmental protective measures. In the meantime, that there are some procedures, which are similar to those of the quality system. The term of IMS is used only with this meaning, defining in ISO standards (from 2000) the audit procedures, corrective and preventive procedures used for quality and environment system (Breen, 1997, Abromeit, 2006).

In Romania, there are remarkable performances regarding the designing of the quality management system, numerous enterprises already having a certified system. In European Union, also the enterprises, including SMEs, have such systems. Regarding the other Romanian systems, there are some manufacturing systems which have environmental systems. Recently, food safety systems have been developed. Less than 20% of Romanian enterprises have a certified quality management system, and less than 5% have a certified environmental system (study of R&DITTMA). In Europe, many enterprises have environmental systems, food safety systems, but so far the health issue is concerned, only few German enterprises started to take an interest in it. Regarding the social responsibility, except for the USA, theoretical preoccupations of implementing such systems are present only in Italy.

The issue, regarding the lack of integration on top management level, is viewed as a source of loss, in general picture of enterprise activity. Supporting the integration of subsystem presented before create the opportunity of an increased overall profit. Scientifically speaking, in Romania, specific researches regarding the quality system have been developed only for a number of universities and research institutes.

As for researches on other types of subsystems, the number of published results is rather small; nevertheless, some papers exist. The experts involved in this project established a partnership made from organizations with remarkable performances in managerial subsystems' analysis and design, this also resulting from their list of published papers.

An analysis concerning the Romanian enterprises management shows a certain discrepancy between the methods used and the desired performances.

The project "Development and the Implementation of the Integrated Management System (DI--IMS)" aims at generating knowledge that leads to an efficient management, thus allowing the enterprises a smooth integration on the European market (Botezatu et al., 2006).

2. DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

As generic term decision support system is referring to a computerized program, which gathers various data from different resources on enterprise level, in order to assist the decision maker in decision making activity, by presenting a set of indicators results from aggregating collected data (see figure 1). This generic term could be used to describe any type of software used to support the decision making process. Most common categories in business application field, covering various enterprise management functions are Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Product Lifecycle Management and Business Intelligence. This entire software categories offer dedicated tools to help the decision maker, by statistical models, simple management science models, spreadsheets, and graphics and so on (Naiman et al., 2006).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

3. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

First, we have to categorize the decision making process, using a framework which specifies the decision types and categories of problems solved.

So the structured process are based on repetitive and routine problems which have standardized solution, such as accounts, assets, receivable, order entry, data used to perform budget analysis, short-term forecasting, decision helped being investment management, warehouse location and distribution systems.

The decision making process, based on knowledge management is three cumulative step processes, having the components:

* intelligence, to determine the conditions that call for decision;

* design, where different possible course of action is invented, developed and analyzed;

* choice, from available courses of action one is selected.

The unstructured process does not use structured solution for those three step described above, most of them are based on human intuition. These types of processes are fuzzy, complex problems with no well-known and accepted solution, such as R&D planning, new technology development, quality assurance planning, integrated management policies.

Between those two types lies semistructured process where parts of its components are structured. The most common applications are referring to new product planning, mergers and acquisition, new production facilities.

We present a three-tier structure, using large implemented Operating Systems and Database Servers: MS W2003 Servers and MS SQL 2005. The concept of data' is referred to three different layers: Data layer, Information layer and Knowledge layer. Data layer, where primary data are inserted in the system, information as final stage (Niculita et al., 2007).

All data are stored in a data warehouse as main repository of the enterprise historical data. Information is data obtain after aggregation process, using aggregate functions depending on subject, interconnected by communication nods existent between organizations involved named data mart (Caron et al., 2004).

This concept supposes a repository of data gathered from operational data and other sources that is designed to obtain knowledge (figure 2). So, the information is obtained from data warehouse after suffering a data mining process. Also, an OLAP (On- Line Analytical Processing) system is provided, to assure a framework for the analysis of multidimensional data. Metadata are expressed in a condensed data mine-able format, or one that facilitates the practice of data mining (Hsu, 2007).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

4. CONCLUSION

The limited awareness of the integrated management systems advantages by organizational decision--making bodies (especially for SMEs), in this case a suitable DSS architecture is required.

So, in this paper we propose a database DSS, the project being on course having the deadline September 2010. Integrating all management subsystems could be a challenge because of lack of integrated information systems on enterprise level and, on second hand, by lack of procedures in particular cases. Preliminary results show that on EU and national level just several subsystem are defined, so another achievement of DI-IMS will be the complete defining of integrated management system, together with all associated procedures and methods. Next step in this research is to implement the integrated management system in large number of organization and to produce the software connected with local ERP systems.

As technical point of view, designing a DSS involves a various set of techniques and for such complexity more studies must be made in order to structure and formalize the problems needed to be assisted. More methods have to be used to study the same problem and the suitable form of DSS, in this case is the cooperative way

An approach in this direction was to envelop the files into a data structure, covering the subject, activity, owner, repository, type, volume etc. and other information needed for link the document with subject of search. Future work will explore the possibility to use XML structure (where all files are enveloped with a header and trailer containing above mentioned information) or to design an external database for managing the files.

5. REFERENCES

Abromeit, M. & Sassano L (2006). Integrated Management System For Safety, Health And The Environment: A Continual Improvement Management System, Available from: http://www.iapa.on.ca/documents/IMS_Presentation. pdf Accessed: 2006-03-20

Botezatu, C.P., Botezatu, C. Carutasu, G. (2006). The development and the implementation of the integrated management system, Annals of DAAAM for 2006 & Proceedings of the 17th International DAAAM Symposium, pp. 053-054, ISSN 1726-9679, ISBN 3901509-57-7

Breen, K., Pecora, G., Gregerson, D. & McCabe, T (1997). A new direction: Integrated Management Systems, Available from: http://www.qualitydigest. com /aug97/ html/ims.html Accessed: 2006-04-07

Caron, E., Daniels, H. (2004). Diagnosis in the OLAP Context. ERIM Report Series Reference No. ERS-2004-063-LIS, 2004

Hsu, C.H., Wang, S.Y., Lin, L.T. (2007), Using Data Mining to Identify Customer Needs in Quality Function Deployment for Software Design, pp.170-174, Proceedings of the 6th WSEAS Int. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering and Data Bases, Corfu Island, Greece, ISSN: 1790-5117, ISBN: 978-960-8457-59-1

Naiman, K., Kopackova, H., Simonova, S., Bilkova, R. (2006). Approaches of quality outputs from the business systems, Proceedings of the 5th WSEAS Int. Conf. on COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE, MAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS AND CYBERNETICS, pp. 282-285, ISSN: 1790-5095, ISSN: 1790-5117, ISBN: 960-8457-56-4,

Niculita, L., Carutasu, N. L., Carutasu G. (2007). Governance Intelligence for Romanian R&D Funding, Proceedings of 7th WSEAS International Conference on APPLIED INFORMATICS AND COMMUNICATIONS (AIC'07), ISSN: 1790-5117, ISBN: 978-960-6766-01-5