Improving the collaboration ability among SMEs by developing an open source based collaboration tool

Abstract

The tool and die making industry in Eastern Europe faces strong competition from the Far East. Most European companies are highly specialized SMEs producing complex one-of-a-kind products used in mass production. The customers are mainly large global players expecting faster, cheaper and more efficient delivery of the complex tools. Often SMEs do not have resources to response to these requirements alone. It is therefore imperative to form sustainable collaborative networks. Inter-organisational collaboration not only requires changes in organisational structures but also the ability to exchange business information, retrieve it, access it, process it and electronically communicate it to all the actors involved in any given business transaction. To do this, SMEs require collaborative IT tools that enable interoperable data excahnge. There are a number of IT sollutions and middleware which support such collaboration, but these are often not affordable or suitable for SMEs, which in Europe, average less than ten employees. This article presents an initiative aiming at improving the collaboration ability of SMEs by introducing a concept comprising a specific business process reference model and a modular open source based collaboration tool with ERP/CRM functionalities, which can be integrated into already existing software systems allowing seamless information processing. Thereby it will improve the interoperability on organizational, application and on data level among SMEs in the tool and die making sector. The approach presented in the proposed paper is basing on the work carried out by the European funded research project Tool-East (EC Contract No. IST-FP6-027802)