Häufig gestellte Fragen
What does CIM (Computer-Integrated Manufacturing) mean in production?
CIM (Computer-Integrated Manufacturing) refers to the concept of connecting all computer-supported business and technical functions of an industrial company via a shared data foundation into a continuous flow of information. This encompasses both the commercial planning side, with production planning and control, and the technical CA systems such as CAD, CAM and CAQ, right down to machine control. The goal is to make data captured once available in all downstream steps without media discontinuities or manual double entry. CIM is therefore not a single product but an overarching integration ambition for the entire IT landscape of a manufacturing company.
Who shaped the CIM concept?
The term Computer-Integrated Manufacturing emerged in the USA as early as the 1970s, for instance with Joseph Harrington's book, and became widely known in the 1980s through the CIM Wheel of the US organisation CASA/SME, published in 1985. In the German-speaking world, CIM was decisively shaped by August-Wilhelm Scheer at Saarland University, who systematically elaborated the concept in the mid-1980s. His Y-CIM model, which brings together the business axis (PPS, i.e. production planning and control) and the technical axis (CAD, CAP, CAM, CAQ) in a "Y", is still considered a classic of business informatics teaching today. During the CIM boom, major manufacturers such as IBM, DEC, HP and Siemens also each developed their own CIM definitions and product worlds.
What components does CIM consist of?
Classically, CIM is described via the Y model, one branch of which represents business-side production planning and control (PPS) and the other of which bundles the technical CA components. These technical building blocks include CAD for computer-aided design, CAE for engineering calculation and simulation, CAP for process planning, CAM for generating machine and NC programs, and CAQ for quality assurance. At the lower tip of the "Y", commercial and technical data converge — a role that today is frequently taken on by an MES as the link between planning and the machine level, and by a PLM system for the end-to-end management of product data. The individual building blocks only constitute CIM once they are coupled via consistent master data and interface logic.
What is the difference between CIM and an ERP system?
An ERP system is a concrete software product that covers core business functions such as order processing, materials management, material requirements planning and capacity planning, whereas CIM is an overarching integration concept for the entire manufacturing company. Within the CIM idea, the ERP system typically forms the business axis, which is linked via defined interfaces with technical systems such as CAD, PLM, MES and CAQ. CIM thus encompasses the ERP but goes beyond it, because it also includes the continuous data flow to the technical design, planning and machine levels. Whether a company comes close to the CIM ambition is revealed less by the ERP product in use than by how smoothly information flows between design, planning, production and commercial processing.
Why did many CIM projects fail?
The original CIM vision of the 1980s and early 1990s suffered from inflated expectations, such as the ideal of the fully automated, "workerless" factory, which could not be realised technically or economically. Added to this were the computing power of the IT systems of the time, which was still too limited for end-to-end networking, proprietary and poorly compatible interfaces, and a lack of open standards. Many projects also significantly exceeded their budgets and remained inflexible because they aimed at a monolithic all-in-one integration. Today's implementations solve these problems more pragmatically through modular, service-oriented architectures, API-first approaches and open standards such as OPC UA for machine communication.
Is CIM still used today, and how does it relate to Industry 4.0?
The original CIM concept as a monolithic full integration is considered to have failed, but its core ideas live on under new labels such as Industry 4.0, smart factory, digital thread and composable ERP. CIM was a rather centralised, top-down integration model of the 1980s that described networked manufacturing within a single company. Industry 4.0, a term coined in 2011 around the Hannover Messe by Henning Kagermann, Wolfgang Wahlster and Wolf-Dieter Lukas, extends this idea with cross-company networking, decentralised intelligence and real-time data from the Internet of Things. In substance, Industry 4.0 pursues the same vision of a continuous information flow, but implements it with modern technology, open standards and decentralised structures.