Enterprise Life Cycle Research Articles

A toolset for building the virtual enterprise

Much research has been undertaken to define what a virtual enterprise is and how it should work. This paper addresses the specific question, how a virtual enterprise can be designed to have the agility to support short-term business opportunities. A framework is presented for the organizational design and the changing business roles of the business architect who constructs the various phases of the virtual enterprise's lifecycle. This infrastructure for creating virtual enterprises is referred to as the “value system designer”; a set of methods and tools to select partners, re-engineer business- and logistic processes and to set up an information and communication platform for the virtual enterprise. The methods and tools have been developed in two longitudial research projects TELEflow and the Virtuelle Fabrik between 1995 and 1999. Focusing on the experiences gained from numerous cases, a summary on crucial success factors for designing virtual enterprises shall be presented. Thus, this paper gives insights and applicable know-how for companies and managing engineers in their role as virtual enterprise architects, for example leaders of project consortia or joint ventures or as first-tier suppliers co-ordinating supplier (sub-) nets.

CIMOSA: enterprise engineering and integration

Enterprises are rather complex systems which have to be managed for their internal affairs, but more importantly for the many relations to the different environments in which they are operating. Today, these environments are changing much more rapidly and the need for relevant information becomes of paramount importance in the decision making processes at all levels of enterprise management. Fluctuations in market demands, technology evolution and changing regulations require very flexible enterprise operations, capable of reacting to those changes. These reactions must be based on relevant and up-to-date information which must be supported by new decision support technology. The challenges in decision support concern the identification of relevant information, easy access and intelligent use of this information. Building and maintaining the enterprise knowledge base and enabling its efficient use for decision support are major tasks of enterprise engineering. Enterprise integration and its subsequent operation in the global environment of customers, suppliers and regulatory bodies will heavily depend on the availability and the continuous extension of this knowledge base. Enterprise modelling will play an important role in creating the knowledge base and in using it for enterprise integration and operational decision support. The paper discusses enterprise engineering as an enterprise life-cycle oriented discipline for identification, design, and implementation of enterprises and their continuous evolution. Current problems in the field are identified and initiatives are presented.

Stage Models of SME Growth Reconsidered

This paper reviews the literature, seeking for a theoretically sound and empirically validated explanation of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) growth to serve as a broad framework for research and policy-making regarding the business growth phenomenon. After a critical appraisal of recent research in the field, the paper argues that reconsideration should be given to a conceptual framework that represents SME growth as a series of stages of development through which the business may pass in an enterprise life-cycle. In particular, it is believed that some reliance can be placed on the Hanks et al. (1993) stages-of-growth model. As well as overcoming concerns that such models are frequently not empirically based, it can also be claimed to at least partially answer the most prevalent objections to this type of model that have appeared in the relevant literature.

Assessing the necessity of enterprise change: Pre‐feasibility and feasibility studies in enterprise integration

The article presents a process model of the least formalized phase of enterprise change, in which management and all other interested parties identify a need for change, assess what change methodology is adequate to handle that change and make preparations for enacting that change process. This process is intended to be embedded in a complete enterprise engineering/ enterprise integration methodology. The aim has been to give a more detailed account of the first phase of enterprise integration, called the 'identification' phase of the enterprise life-cycle. A top level of the methodology's process is presented as a series of IDEF0 diagrams and their companion explanations, although future versions may be developed in more elaborate languages (e.g. CIMOSA modelling constructs). The original aim to develop this part of the methodology was for the method to be especially suitable for the service industry; it has been found that there was no need to be service industry specific on this level and that considerations applied equally to service and manufacturing.

Contributions of CIMOSA to GERAM

CIMOSA is an open systems architecture for CIM developed by the ESPRIT Consortium AMICE. It is based on a three-stage, process-based enterprise modelling approach, partly covering the enterprise life cycle. It covers functional/behavioural, information, resource and organisation aspects of an integrated enterprise at various modelling levels. It structures CIM systems as sets of distributed, cooperative agents (called functional entities) linked by an integrating infrastructure to timely execute the many concurrent business processes of manufacturing enterprises. This paper discusses in which way CIMOSA fulfils GERAM (the Generic Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology) requirements, as defined by the IFAC/IFIP Task Force on Architectures for Enterprise Integration.

Conceptual architecture of an object library for design, control and simulation of a manufacturing enterprise

The object-oriented paradigm facilitates the creation of software objects which can be easily modified, extended, specialized and readily reused across applications. This concept is gaining wide acceptance in the design, control and simulation of manufacturing systems. Object-oriented concepts can be used to design and implement a software object library, the components of which can be easily assebled to develop decision support tools for use throughout the life cycle of a manufacturing enterprise. This paper presents a methodology for developing architectures of a reusable library, and includes an example of a browser to illustrate a mechanism for organizing the storage and location of objects in the library.