Levels of Information Protocols Unit: A Production Management Point of View

Key performance indicators play a very important role in business scenario, in order to provide strategic feedback, supplying information systems and giving support for decision-making. However, to get information to feed these indicators, modern systems have to collect data from a broad of different systems and technologies that means operational risks and costs. Despite Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools and Extensible Markup Language (XML), protocols remain very diverse because diversity of business processes and structures. Thus, this work aims to analyze information protocols and its usability, looking specifically to utilities industry as a starting point for a future expansion of analysis. Business structures and processes are described and respective associations with specific information protocols are made, building a framework of usability and relevance in production management. To reach the goals, this work starts presenting theories and concepts from a background literature. The second part shows a typical business structure and processes for utilities in Brazilian scenario, describing the set information protocols used and how these protocols may support the business. Third part, presents analysis of protocols, verifying thru successful cases and pitfalls valuable contributions to production management. In the last part, some remarks and suggestions are presented according to the case and market trends.