Scenario:

Please read this scenario prior to answering the Question

You are serving as the Lead Enterprise Architect at a major supplier in the automotive industry. The company is headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio with manufacturing plants across the United States, Brazil, Germany, Japan and South Kore

a. Each of these plants has been operating its own planning and production scheduling systems, as well as custom developed applications that drive the automated production equipment at each plant.

The company is implementing lean manufacturing principles to minimize waste and improve the efficiency of all of its production operations. During a recent exercise held for internal quality improvement, it was determined that a significant reduction in process waste could be achieved by replacing the current planning and scheduling systems with a common Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system located in the Cleveland data center. This central system would provide support to each of the plants replacing the functionality in the existing systems. It would also eliminate the need for full data centers at each of the plant facilities. A reduced number of IT staff could support the remaining applications. In some cases, a third-party contractor could provide those staff.

The Enterprise Architecture department has been operating for several years and has mature, well-developed architecture governance and development processes that are strongly based on TOGAF 9.

At a recent meeting, the Architecture Board approved a Request for Architecture Work sponsored by the Chief Engineer of Global Manufacturing Operations. The request covered the initial architectural investigations and the development of a comprehensive architecture to plan the transformation.

The Common ERP Deployment architecture project team has now been formed, and the project team has been asked to develop an Architecture Vision that will achieve the desired outcomes and benefits. Some of the plant managers have expressed concern about the security and reliability of diving their planning and production scheduling from a remote centralized system. The Chief Engineer wants to know how these concerns can be addressed.

Refer to the Scenario

During the initial meeting of the Common ERP Deployment architecture project team, a number of alternative recommendations for how to proceed are put forward by members of the team.

You have been asked to select the most appropriate recommendation to ensure that the team evaluates different approaches to the problem and clarifies the requirements for the architecture.

Based on TOGAF 9, which of the following is the best answer?