The Electronics Agile Manufacturing Research Institute (EAMRI) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with its industrial partners Lucent Technologies, Pitney Bowes, and CISCO Systems, is developing new methodologies for network-based design and agile manufacturing in the electronics industry, and conducting demonstration projects and assessments of the effectiveness of these new approaches. The emphasis of the EAMRI is the development, integration, and demonstration of e-engineering tools that facilitate distributed interactions among design, planning, manufacturing, and marketing functions. This paper presents recent research results on issues of scalable enterprise systems building upon the Virtual Design Environment (VDE) e-engineering technology.