Enterprise Flexibility Research Articles

Effects of Outsourcing on the Flexibility Dynamic of System of Systems

The requirements of various stakeholders associated with System of Systems (SoS) are constantly changing. Consequently, the shareholders priorities of return and risk continuously shift. However, their expectations of gaining value from the SoS are enhancing. One way of enhancing value from the SoS is by having the right amount of flexibility associated with it. Flexibility can be defined as the ability of a system to be able to adapt and cope with the changing environment. SoS flexibility means creating options at various levels, developing ways and means of change across the range of options. One possible way of creating enterprise flexibility is by outsourcing certain functions which would help affect the flexibility of an organization. The outsourcing done might also have an effect on each of the building blocks of SoS Flexibility. In this paper, we will look at how outsourcing could affect each of the building blocks of SoS flexibility as well as show whether it is beneficial or not for an organization to outsource depending on how it affects their flexibility. We also come up with a matrix to show the effects of insufficient as well as excessive outsourcing on the overall functioning of the SoS.

Organizing a virtual manufacturing enterprise: an analytic network process based approach for enterprise flexibility

Virtual manufacturing is a dynamic enterprise structure that will enable future competitiveness in the fast changing business environment. This is made possible through quick IT based integration of flexible and core competent business entities capable of providing value-added product and services. Flexibility elements represent change capabilities of enterprise wide processes and resources in time and cost dimensions. Value chain considerations require synergy among the participating flexible resources. Also decision information synchronization delays need to be managed so that other entity flow processes in the enterprise remain well synchronized. This may require a capability of dynamic changes in flexible structures leading to effective virtual enterprises. There is a need to develop suitable enterprise architectures for virtual enterprises that offer an increasing focus on agility. Infrastructure support for integration of flexible capability to attain synergy among resources is necessary for enterprise agility. We conceptualize virtual manufacturing (VM) as an integrating infrastructure of flexible resources made possible through alliance of enterprises that are individually core competent in specific business function. Such a VM can attain the required cost, flexibility and responsiveness characteristics in its operations to provide solution to the demanding customer in a global dynamic market. Modelling frameworks depicting these composite flexibility states have complex and tacit interrelationship with plural business goals. Analytical network process (ANP) has been used to model the interrelationship of different decision domains with a view to prioritize enterprise wide flexibility dimensions. The ANP modelling framework takes into consideration the interdependency among sub-strategies. We demonstrate through sensitivity analysis that strategic shift is required to accommodate changes due to dynamic condition in the business environment.

Elastyczność działania małopolskich przedsiębiorstw w procesie europejskiej integracji gospodarczej

Artykuł traktuje o elastyczności działania polskich przedsiębiorstw w procesie europejskiej integracji gospodarczej. Celem artykułu jest analiza wpływu akcesji Polski do Unii Europejskiej na zmiany elastyczności działania polskich przedsiębiorstw. Artykuł zawiera wyniki badań własnych przeprowadzonych na grupie 323 przedsiębiorstw z województwa małopolskiego w 2007 roku, czyli 3 lata po akcesji (analiza ex post). W celu statystycznej weryfikacji hipotez w badaniach zastosowano nieparametryczny test niezależności chi-kwadrat.

Managing ERP system evaluation and selection in SMEs using the six-imperatives methodology

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) adoption involves initiating the appropriate business process changes and information technology upgrades to enhance enterprise performance, quality, costs, flexibility and responsiveness. While the number of articles in ERP implementation is substantial, limited attention has been given to the ERP adoption by Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Motivated by the organisation fit of the ERP concept, we propose a structured methodology for ERP system evaluation and selection which can be easily used by SMEs, as it provides the necessary information for their decision-making process. This article describes the ERP evaluation and selection methodology followed by an industrial Greek company. The proposed methodology consists of a framework built upon six imperatives, which generate a number of ERP objectives materialised through a set of levers. The analysis results in the identification of tailor-made ERP objectives, which, in turn, are used in a multiple criteria model as part of the decision-making process to select, from a list of alternatives, a suitable ERP vendor.

THE PROVISION OF LOCAL PUBLIC SERVICES THROUGH MIXED ENTERPRISES: THE ITALIAN CASE

ABSTRACT**: The rules regulating the creation of mixed enterprises companies (public‐private companies) for the provision of local public services have been subjected, in Italy, to a rather complex evolution over time. The new rules introduced allow the creation of a mixed private public enterprise, with either public or private majority; in any case the private shareholder must be selected through a public tender procedure. The data seems to show that mixed enterprises have been used by municipalities as a tool that allows the exploitation of economies of scale and of scope, without necessarily losing control of the leadership and direction of the local utility. Better flexibility of mixed enterprises is also shown by the proportion of mixed enterprises acting outside the territory which is higher than the proportion of public enterprises similarly engaged. Moreover the presence of multi‐service units is proportionally higher in mixed enterprises.

Non-Union Employee Representation in Australia

Non-union representative employee participation recently has attracted increasing international attention in employment relations due to the growing representation gap in many countries as union membership declines, and mounting evidence of the benefits of representative employee participation for enterprise flexibility and efficiency. However, relatively little is known about Australian experiments in employee participation, although it is essential to learn from Australian experience in order to develop effective public policy. This case study represents a contribution to this larger project. SMEC is a non-union employee representative body that has adopted a European works council organizational model. The case study evaluates SMEC's effectiveness as a non-union form of representative employee participation. It concludes that the opportunities for the formation of genuinely independent works council style organs of employee participation remain severely constrained by the current Australian regulatory environment, which tends to encourage a union substitution role.

Flexibility in Lithuania Enterprises: Comparative Analysis of Garment, Food and

The article presents the comparative analysis of flexibility in Lithuania enterprises. The choice of the theme is based on some aspects. First, the influence of highly dynamic environment conditioned by rapid technological changes, increased consumers’ requirements, competition globalization. Trying to keep up with the dynamics of situation, it is very important to perceive the capability of an organization and understand what is going on in their business environment and to take actions before it might be too late. On the second hand, Lithuania enterprises have functioned under the conditions of transitional economy for a long time. This economy has been characterized by the fusion of planned and market economies. A lot of researchers who have studied the peculiarities of Western Europe enterprises have stressed the influence of planned economy, its unwillingness to change, difficulty to adapt to rapidly changing market requirements, low enterprise flexibility, of avoidance risk, fear of responsibility as well as low initiative of employees. It can’t be unlikely stated that today enterprises follow only the principles of market economy, especially when the interior activity of an enterprise is concerned. The attitude of leaders and employees is of the utmost importance, heaving in mind tasks, decisions, enterprise management, changes and development. This attitude has been formed for decades and although it changes with time and is closely connected with changes of business cultural values, the process is not rapid. Third, enterprise flexibility is very much dependent on the sector type. The enterprises of low technologies are functioning under less dynamic conditions than as it is in the case of the enterprises of high technologies. This influences their flexibility. This article presents various authors’ notions of enterprises flexibility, generalizing the main enterprises flexibility features. Basing on the scientific literature analysis a questionnaire was prepared. The survey was carried out in Lithuanian national enterprises where national culture peculiarities based on particular country social, economic, political, and technological development are demonstrated the best. Total 25 garment, food and IT enterprises were surveyed, 748 respondents. Analysis of descriptive statistics was used for research results process. Research results have proved the hypothesis about the flexibility of different enterprises. Surveyed IT enterprises appeared to be the most flexible as compared to garment and food enterprises. However, a general flexibility evaluation should be taken into account. This flexibility could be evaluated as an average one.

Agents-based design for fault management systems in industrial processes

Industrial necessities claim global management procedures integrating information systems in order to manage and to use the whole information about controlled processes and thus, to assure a good process behaviour. Fault management and maintenance are vital aspects in industrial management, in this sense, maintenance systems should support decision-making tools, new maintenance approaches and techniques, the enterprise thinking and flexibility. In this work, a reference model for fault management in industrial processes is proposed. This model is based on a generic framework using multi-agent systems for distributed control systems; in this sense, the fault management problem is viewed like a feedback control process and the actions are related to the decision-making in the scheduling of the preventive maintenance task and the running of preventive and corrective specific maintenance tasks. A particular methodology permitting the conception and analysis of the agent systems is used for the agents design. As a result, a set of models describing the general characteristics of the agents, specific tasks, communications and coordination is obtained.

An economic evaluation model of product mix flexibility

This paper develops a product mix flexibility model comprising labor flexibility, machine flexibility, routing flexibility, and information technology, with the product mix flexibility measured by an economic index. Outputs from the model can be useful in making suitable production decisions to produce multiple products in an uncertain environment. Example solutions are given. How the product mix flexibility is affected by flexibility factors is discussed, and the results show that the bottleneck plays the most important role. This paper can help economic evaluation when product mix flexibility and the factors affecting flexibility are to be improved. It can also assist in making enterprise flexibility promotion decisions.

Towards a Cyberinfrastructure for Enhanced Scientific Collaboration: Providing its 'Soft' Foundations May Be the Hardest Part

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises to enable more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. The February 2003 report of the Atkins Committee to the US NSF Directorate of Computer and Information System Engineering urged that funding be provided for a major enhancement of computer and network technologies, thereby creating a cyberinfrastructure whose facilities would support and transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research. The articulation of this programmatic vision reflects a widely shared expectation that solving the technical engineering problems associated with the advanced hardware and software systems of the cyberinfrastructure will yield revolutionary payoffs by empowering individual researchers and increasing the scale, scope and flexibility of collective research enterprises. Animated by much the same vision, the UK e-Science Core Programme has been engaged in developing an array of open standards middleware platforms, intended to support Grid enabled science and engineering research. This paper, however, argues that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve the outcomes envisaged for these undertakings. Success in realizing the potential of e-Science - and other global collaborative activities supported by the 'cyberinfrastructure '- if it is to be achieved, will more likely be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legal and technical transformations. The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting research collaborations - that is to say, its supposedly 'softer' (non-engineering) parts - are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges facing 'e-Science' lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures created by the existing legal and administrative regimes. Although a number of these same conditions and circumstances appear to be equally significant obstacles to commercial provision of Grid services in inter-organizational contexts, the domain of publicly supported scientific collaboration will provide a more hospitable environment in which to experiment with a variety of new approaches to solving these problems. Towards that end, several 'solution modalities' can be proposed that feature a modular contractual approach to the flexible design of research collaboration agreements. The basic principles and the institutional mode of implementation that will be suggested are sufficiently general that they could also be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcend organizational boundaries.

Analyzing firms' strategic investment decisions in a real options' framework

Within the context of investment under uncertainty, the real options literature has led to models that capture primarily the time to wait flexibility of monopolistic corporations' investment decision. In this paper, we propose an approach which relies on barrier options to model production and/or sales delocalization flexibility for multinational enterprises making decisions under exchange rate uncertainty. We then extend the model by introducing game theoretic considerations to show how the information set and the competitive structure of the market may lead firms to act strategically and exercise their delocalization options preemptively at an endogenously fixed exchange rate barrier.

Enterprise agility: a view from the PRISM lab

The agility of enterprises is analyzed in this article from two perspectives: business and organizational agility, and operational and logistics agility. Because of the powerful support of information technologies, mainly AI and networking, companies can seek collaborators to accomplish complex customers’ requirements without investing to expand their own capacity. The emerging alliances of enterprises are virtually formed for various customers’ and markets’ needs. This concept sustains business and organizational agility. In terms of operational and logistics agility, this article suggests that the connection between the autonomy functions and agility requires further study. Our research has proposed that error detection and recovery, and conflict resolution are two significant functions of operational and logistics agility, and determine the expected benefits from the business and organizational agility. The link between a given enterprise flexibility and agility is also analyzed.

The European Employment Strategy and the EMU: You Must Invest to Save

There are no secrets behind Europe's high and persistent unemployment. It is not a question of competitiveness Europe is doing well on global markets. We cannot blame our main trading partners, or low-wage countries, for our shortcomings. And we should not blame fiscal policies, the convergence process. The reasons behind unemployment are internal to Europe. There are two distinct explanations.One has been our inability to tackle macroeconomic shocks in a coordinated way. As a consequence, downturns have been deeper and recoveries weaker than they need have been. The resultant low average rates of economic growth produced inadequate job creation relative to the growth of the potential workforce. The other explanation has been our inability to reform labour market policies and social protection systems to meet the labour market needs of today. Europe's policies were originally created for labour markets with one male breadwinner, working in manufacturing or construction. Labour market and social policies f...

The Law and Employee Participation—Evidence From the Federal Enterprise Agreements Process

In 1993 the Industrial Relations Reform Act amended the Industrial Relations Act 1988 (Cwlth) by, among other things, introducing certain enterprise bargaining provisions into Australian labour law. These provisions required that a process of 'consultation' with employees should take place in the negotiation of an agreement. They also appeared to require that an agreement contain a process enabling ongoing consultation over work-related matters at the workplace. The research undertaken for this article attempted to assess the impact of these provisions on schemes for employee involvement in workplace decision making. All certified agreements approved by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission between 1 April 1994 and 30 March 1995, and all enterprise flexibility agreements approved by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission between 1 April 1994 and 6 September 1995 were examined for evidence of compliance with the new consultation provisions introduced into the Act. The conclusion drawn is that while many agreements complied with the Act, there was a general failure on the part of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission to implement both the letter and the spirit of the law on 'consultation' pertaining to the certification of agreements. On the whole we feel that the legislation failed to produce results that would have strengthened the spread of employee involvement practices in industry.

Non-Union Bargaining: Enterprise Flexibility Agreements

One of the key objectives of the Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993 (Cwlth) is to develop an industrial relations system in Australia based on enterprise bargain ing. To make enterprise bargaining accessible to the non-union sector the legisla tive framework provides for the making of enterprise flexibility agreements. These agreements can be made directly between employer and employees without union involvement where the workforce is not unionized. It has thus been popularly referred to as the 'non-union' bargaining stream. This article examines the extent to which the legislation on enterprise flexibility agreements does provide for non- union workplace bargaining. It does so by examining the way in which the legislation provides for union involvement at the various stages in the process of negotiating and formalizing an enterprise flexibility agreement. The provision in the legislation of a formal system of non-union bargaining has been criticized as posing a threat to the traditional representational role played by unions in Austral ian industrial relations. In this context, the role of the Bargaining Division of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission in facilitating bargaining and its decisions concerning the rights of a union to represent employees in their negotia tions with the employer are also considered. Finally, some conclusions are offered as to why only a relatively small number of enterprise flexibility agreements have been approved.

Total production control

Abstract The new requirements for enterprise flexibility, quality improvement, costs and throughput limes reduction cannot be achieved by using traditional approaches. While US and European industry developed the grand CIM, FMS, CAD/CAM and MRP II projects, Japan introduced just-in-time and lean production, not to demonstrate the possibilities of the new technology but to expose operational inefficiencies and waste in the manufacturing process. The main CIM effort was in the flexibility and productivity improvement, bin its implementation stressed above all the technical aspects of the factory integration and the most flexible production factor, people, remained in the background. The new technology must be implemented into the organizational framework that uses and develops the skills, knowledge and creativity of the human resources. People in the production process need a new kind of decision support in the rapidly changing business environment. A new concept, total production control (TPC), that is a r...

Enterprise Flexibility Agreements in Small Business: Rhetoric or Reality?

The federal government's industrial relations reforms have aimed to decentralize industrial relations to the enterprise level. In order to encourage enterprise bargain ing in all Australian workplaces, division 3 of part VIB of the Commonwealth Industrial Relations Act 1988 enabled constitutional corporations to obtain a non- union enterprise agreement. This type of agreement is known as an enterprise flexibility agreement'. It was expected that enterprise flexibility agreements would act as a mechanism to extend enterprise bargaining to the small business sector. However; research reveals that fourteen months after the introduction of the legisla tion, only sixteen of the sixty-eight enterprise flexibility agreements approved by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission applied to small businesses. This find ing supports the argument that the formal system of ( federal) industrial relations has little impact on the manner in which industrial relations are conducted and regulated in small businesses. Indeed, this study would suggest that the federal government's reforms are largely irrelvant to small businesses.

MAMBA: Automatic customization of computerized business processes

Due to recent market challenges organizational researchers have developed a variety of strategies how organizations can continuously survive in highly dynamic, sometimes even hostile environments. One of the most important strategies aims to enhance the flexibility of enterprises through widespread decentralization, while another well-known approach advocates customer orientation through systematic business process (re-) engineering. This paper addresses organizational flexibility and business process orientation from the perspective of information systems. It starts from a requirements analysis which investigates the challenges of contemporary organizational strategies and then proceeds towards an approach that supports the flexible modeling of business processes by linking decentralized organizational procedures. For this purpose a set of process modeling and process interaction operators is defined. These operators also allow to automatically create and customize configurations of computerized business processes. This progress in cooperative information processing technology contributes significantly to the recently emerged concept of the computerized enterprise. The concepts are presented in the context of a banking application, namely the Credit Advisory Subsystem of our banking application MAMBA.

Small Enterprise Flexibility in Sudan

Summary This article analyses small enterprises in a Sudanese town through the flexible specialisation lens. Deteriorating macro-economic conditions during the 1980s have heightened the inefficiency of large enterprises but policy-biases against small enterprises remain. In a study of four sub-sectors it is shown that flexibility exists in terms of labour use and product range, but that there are few signs of inter-firm cooperation and innovative behaviour. The conclusion is that flexible specialisation is an inappropriate term for these small enterprises and that it will remain so as long as the macro-policy bias continues. Résumé La souplesse des entreprises de petite envergure au Soudan Cet article examine les entreprises de petite envergure dans une ville soudanaise sous l'optique de la spécialisation souple. La détérioration des conditions macro-économiques durant les années 1980 a servi a souligner le manque d'efficacité des entreprises de grande envergure; toutefois, les préjugés contre les entreprises de faible envergure persistent au niveau des politiques adoptées. Il est démontré dans une étude de quatre sous-secteurs qu'une certaine souplesse existe en termes du déploiement de la main-d'oeuvre et de la gamme de produits ainsi créés; par contre les signes de la coopération entre les entreprises et d'une attitude novatrice restent peu nombreux. L'article aboutit à la conclusion que la “spécialisation souple” est un terme peu approprié dans le cas des entreprises de faible envergure, et qu'il en restera de même pour aussi longtemps que le préjugé en instance persiste au niveau de la macro-politique. Resumen La flexibilidad de la pequeña empresa en Sudan Este análisis de refiere a las pequeñas empresas en una ciudad del Sudán vistas a través del lente de la especialización flexible. La situación macro-económica en deterioro durante la década del 80 ha puesto de relieve la ineficiencia las grandes empresas, pero los prejuicios programáticos contra la pequeña empresa aún subsisten. En un estudio de cuatro sub-sectores se demuestra que la flexibilidad existe en términos de uso de mano de obra y líneas de productos, pero también que hay pocos indicios de cooperación entre compañías y comportamientos innovativos. En conclusión: la “especialización flexible” es un nombre inapropiado para estas empresas y esta situación persistirá mientras continúe el prejuicio de los macro-programas.

Agroecological foundations of alternative agriculture in California

Most agricultural regions of California enjoy long growing seasons, fertile soils and irrigantion, all conditions that favor a highly diversified cropping. In addition, the wide variety of vegetables, field and tree crops determined a high diversity and flexibility of agricultural enterprises. Despite these factors, Californian agroecosystems are dominated by monocultural cropping systems. Although productive, these systems lack the ecological features to ensure efficient nutrient cycling, water and soil conservation, and biotic regulation. Productivity is subsidized with chemical inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers, some of which caue undesirable environmental and public health hazards. Large-scale monocultures are also highly susceptible to wind erosion and are dependent on ground water for irrigation, leading in some areas to a considerable ‘ leading in some areas to a considerable ‘overdraft’. In other regions, poor field drainage and rising water are leading to unacceptable soil salinity levels. In summary, Californian agriculture is very productive, but the environmental costs of such productivity is threatening the sustainability of agriculture. The search for self-sustaining, low-input, diversified and energy-efficient agricultural systems is now a major concern of researchers, farmers, policy makers and the public in California. The long tradition in biological pest control in California, as well as the experience of a number of organic farmers who developed low-input systems through ‘trial and error’, provide the building blocks for the search for a more sustainable agriculture. A key strategy is sustainable agriculture is to restore the agricultural diversity of the agricultural landscape. Diversity can be enhanced in lime through crop rotations and sequences, and in space in the form of cover crops, intercropping, agroforestry crop/livestock,mixturee, etc. Vegetation diversification not only results in pest regulation through restoration of natural controls, but also produces optimal nutrient recycling, energy conservation and less dependence on cultural inputs. In California although this new approach to agriculture is actively researched. realistically it will work only if it is economicically sensible and can be carried out within the constraints of a fairty normal agricultural system. Therefore, adoption of recommended diversification designs will procesd as these reduce costs and increase the efficiency and viability of farmers.