Today's fast-moving, ever-changing manufacturing environment demands faster responsiveness to changes in the market, product innovation, and tight supply chain management. In this environment, ignorance is one of the greatest threats to a manufacturing company's health and success. Executives and senior managers must understand how the enterprise is meeting strategic objectives. Middle-level managers need visibility into how they are performing against tactical objectives. Responsible individuals must be notified immediately when supply chain issues threaten the completion of objectives, so actions can be taken to ensure customer delivery and quality requirements continue to be met.

A well-implemented and effective enterprise information system delivers overall visibility into the health of the company and its operations and provides detailed information for performance measurement, process management, and problem identification and remediation. Such a system can help improve revenue through competitive advantage, can help you understand your business and manage it better, reduce operational costs, improve performance, and improve results for all stakeholders — owners, executives, managers and employees.

An enterprise information system will capture literally thousands of pieces of information each day, as activities are reported throughout the enterprise. All of this detailed data is of little use without placing it in context and seeing each activity in relationship with all the other activities and the overall plan. Turning data into meaningful information is an up-and-down process.

Bits of data, taken together and summarized, form higher level contextual information that shows status, accomplishments, and importance. From high-level summaries, the observer must be able to dive back down to details to understand exactly what is happening and how to drive those activities toward the goals and objectives. Management information and analysis is only as good as the data it is based on. Therefore, it is important to make sure that data is collected as quickly as possible and with the least amount of human intervention, which tends to introduce delays and errors. It is equally important to use automation as much as possible for collecting data from supply chain partners. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the most commonly used method today, but EDI is rapidly being replaced by XML-based e-commerce communications and Web-based portal technologies.
All systems should be integrated so information can pass freely between them without manual re-entry.

Over the years, many manufacturers have been left with "islands of automation" after implementation of specialized information systems in isolated portions of the business. While each island contains valuable information, absence of integration prevents the effective use of that information for overall management and coordination of effort toward company objectives.