Abstract: Network, globalization and personalization have become the new trend in the manufacturing industry. In this kind of environment it is necessary and beneficial to discuss how to implement agile manufacturing （AM） according to China’s situation. The process from CIMS to AM is the compact cohesion of four advanced manufacturing technologies: product data management ＆ enterprise resource plan, concurrent engineering, virtual manufacturing and flexible manufacturing. A software architecture is presented in this paper, which enables an enterprise to synthesize any collection of resources and technologies into a production system and become an agile enterprise. At the highest level, four technology requirements are identified for agile enterprises: （1） Common communication protocol, （2） A uniform object technology base for system and application interoperability, （3） Common information model specification and exchange, and （4） Cooperative management of integrated agile enterprise processes.