ABSTRACT
Studies (Muhlemann et al. 1990, Afferson et al. 1992) have been carried out over a number of years which have concerned the decision support needs of smaller manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) and ways of satisfying these needs. A focus of this work has been to produce a decision support system (DSS) which would satisfy the requirements of a broad range of SMEs, thus reducing the cost of individual systems. The approach adopted was to identify a small set of core production management areas (Sharp et al. 1990) and to develop for each area, using a control loop based data model (Price et al. 1992), a template to support the appropriate decision making. These templates were linked to form the generic system which was capable of providing most of the decision support required. Because the system was developed using a fourth generation language
(4GL) and a relational database management system (RDBMS), it was possible to modify it to meet many company specific needs.
