Perspectives of the On-line Engineering Office

Abstract

Internet environment and internet based tools enable numerous opportunities of establishing new enterprises even without any actual, physical office. Such enterprises are already functioning in many services, e.g. language, banking, trading, to full extent. This is also true in various engineering activities. Such an environment is also beneficial in case of multinational companies, since it enables new, powerful means of communication throughout the world as a part of their distributed collaboration environment, as well as in small firms where the primary benefit lies in possibilities of the joint virtual collaboration. On the other hand, emerging design and production systems are characterised by their atomisation. This is true for huge international enterprises, establishing their branch offices and production units in expenses and resources optimized manner. And it is also true in case of specialised small and micro enterprises. Namely, due to high tech product complexity, the latter can be competitive mostly in combined efforts. Such companies operate in a distributed production and design environment. It should be also stated that the role of the innovative design in economic growth of companies is crucial. Therefore, a distributed development environment must introduce a new working paradigm, adapted to permanent design innovation and sustainable product development. The proposed chapter deals with the On-line engineering office (OLEO) concept. Its basis and structures will be discussed in detail, and several possible scenarios and advantages will be presented to illustrate the proposed concept. It is our belief that such a concept can importantly support not only SMEs but micro companies as well. Particularly in small economies it can be difficult to maintain and develop prosperous small specialised engineering business, thus it is necessary to spread such an enterprise over the borders. And the proposed concept seems to be a feasible solution. Contemporary information and communication technologies (ICT) enable different means and methods for e-collaboration. The key requirements for implementation of the design and development collaboration framework are functional and resource integration; synchronous and asynchronous communication; data, file and document management; project management; and common cooperation space in a distributed environment. Besides, the ICT platform has to assure a high level of privacy, safety, and reliability, which all are essential building blocks of the OLEO. It relies on service oriented architecture and virtual portal technology and on virtual coordination unit in organisational sense. The crucial advantage of the proposed concept is that it is lean. Lean companies are well known organisational issue. Large companies tend to “leanify” their production. And let