ABSTRACT
With the growing need to compete in an international market quality and design to manufacture time is becoming ever more important. Efficient performance demands an integrated, transparent information flow from tender to design to manufacture and for companies endeavouring to maintain a competitive position the key to control of information is a database (DB) and information management system (Rolland (1990)). Ideally all the data structures and data relationships necessary to run the business must be resident on the system, for most companies
however the development of data systems is evolutionary resulting in a variety of hardware and data management systems. In most cases the short term effective substitution of an existing system by a single DB system is not possible. This paper explains the way that ABB Turbinen Nümberg GmbH (ABB TUR) proposes to solve the problem of data integration and management.
