Coordination among computer integrated manufacturing databases has become one of the key difficulties in the implementation of an integrated system. The issue of how to implement interdependency among CIM databases has some alternative technological solutions, trading off various levels of mutual consistency against various levels of the system throughput. Although these alternatives and their formalization are important issues in the database theory perspective, this research deals with an engineering issue of devising a methodology to select among these alternatives in any given case. A heuristic optimization model, with worst time complexity ofO(N2) is presented. Its effectiveness is analyzed with a case study and a series of sensitivity analysis activations. This is a first attempt to solve this problem. Our empirical results show that the overall system performance, as reflected by a system's goal-function, is substantially improved by the use of our model, relative to intuitive or trivial solutions.