4 Graphical Languages for Enterprise Control

The market for many industrial production companies is getting tougher as the global competition is increasing. The collaborative manufacturing model, see Figure 1 (Gorbach & Nick, 2002), reflects the fact that companies today need to collaborate both externally and internally to reach success on the market. The external collaboration is presented through the two horisontal axis’. The value chain axis highlights the need for cooperation with suppliers and customers, and the lifecycle axis that goes from design to support often includes third parties and thereby also calls for external collaborations. The vertical axis, the enterprise axis, represents the need for internal cooperation from the business side to the production side, sometimes expressed in statements such as ”shop floor to top floor”, ”sensor to boardroom” or ”Plant to enterprise”. The internal cooperation is, in this article refered to as Enterprise Control.