Virtual Enterprise Life Cycle Research Articles

Virtual Enterprise integration management based on a Meta-enterprise – a PMBoK approach

A Virtual Enterprise (VE) can be viewed as a project, with a lifecycle corresponding to the period between its creation and integration of the constituting elements until its dissolution, comprehending its operation and including its reconfigurations. The authors propose that the VE lifecycle is aligned and can be managed using the frameworks provided by several bodies of knowledge, such as the PMBoK Guide. In this paper the authors propose an alignment referential between the Project Management phases defined by PMBoK and management processes during the VE lifecycle.

INTEGRATED PRODUCT AND ENTERPRISE DESIGN FOR GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS

This paper presentsan overview of the challenge to integrate product and process life cycles in maintaining global competitiveness of an enterprise and proposes IEKOS as a possible solution . It provides the reader with a framework of two virtual life cycles which create a problem solving matrix for the industrial engineer. In this matrix, bordered by the virtual enterprise life cycle and the virtual product life cycles, the business functions of analyze, design deploy and operate are predominantly functions executed by the, industrial engineer. The different phases of each life cycle serves as a framework to a virtual industrial engineering toolkit providing access to detailed functions, formats, examples and a series of software and other "tools" available to the industrial engineer.In conclusion a brief overview is provided of the progress of the IEKOS toolkit which is under development at the department of Industrial Engineering at Stellenbosch University.

Frame Design of the Third-Party Information Support Platform Oriented to Full Lifecycle of Virtual Enterprise

Virtual enterprise (VE) has now become an indispensable way for modern business to cope with the intense market competition. However, the existing construction method of information support platform would not be able to adapt to the development of VE. This paper first analyzed the information demand oriented to the full lifecycle of VE, and then put forward a frame design of the third-party information support platform according to the above information demand, which included the frame of the information support platform, the analysis of layer function and its operation mechanism. Finally we summarized the full paper. The proposed frame is capable of assisting the third-party organizations to implement information support platform fast and dynamically according to different industry background. So it has good application prospect.

A hybrid control architecture and coordination mechanism in virtual manufacturing enterprise

The concept of Virtual Enterprise (VE), a special organization of manufacturing units and enterprises, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Unlike traditional enterprise, VE is most suitable in production environments that experience frequent changes in product mix. To complete a complex task composed of some sub-tasks, traditional control architecture is not versatile enough to coordinate and schedule multi-site and multi-type resources, especially in resolving resource conflicts during operations. Using hybrid control architecture, VE can execute the effective control on multi-site enterprises to support the rapid response to customer demands. Coordination mechanism running through the total life cycle of VE is applied to coordinating and scheduling the requests from different tasks and resources, which make VE flexible, adaptive and robust. In this paper, the hybrid control architecture based on multi-agent technology that supports the cooperation of enterprises is presented. Coordination mechanism and the corresponding optimal models are discussed. Finally a case study is used as an illustration to present the detailed coordination mechanism.

A systemic methodology via system dynamics for a virtual enterprise architecture constructing wireless payments

A Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a temporary alliance of member companies, which join to take advantage of a market opportunity. VE will possess almost no employees or inventory resources. Each member company will provide its own core competencies. The focus of this paper, is the analysis of an architecture of a VE that constructs wireless payments with the use of the systemic Problem Structuring Methodology (PSM) via System Dynamics. In this approach, the computational software package I-Think. was used. I-Think. is a scientific and practical tool of simulation of System Dynamics, for the development and analysis of business models and processes. First PSM is used for the initial conceptual planning and then I-Think. is used to simulate all the extreme and smooth situations of the VE life cycle. The results from this analysis are being shown on a new PSM schema, including all possible types of communication between the participants.

Effective management of dynamic and multiple supply chains

This paper presents a system called SC2 (supply chain smart coordination), a multi-agent system which was developed based on the business intelligence paradigm in order to better support the management of dynamic and multiple supply chains inside a virtual enterprise scenario. SC2 offers an integrated and global environment for coordinating the execution of business processes in the production, distribution and sales chains, according to the virtual enterprise life cycle. Via a lean interface based on XML and CORBA, SC2 can obtain reliable, timely and interoperable information from the supply chain members, comprising a number of heterogeneous information sources and legacy systems. Results are presented and discussed at the end of the paper.

Fuzzy analytical approach to partnership selection in formation of virtual enterprises

The main objective of this paper is to present a new fuzzy approach to partnership selection in the formation of virtual enterprises. The phases of the virtual enterprise life cycle are briefly described and it is shown that the partnership selection is a key factor in the formation of such complex organisations. It is justified that the partnership selection process should be formulated as a multiple criteria decision-making problem under uncertainty. A new fuzzy programming method is proposed for assessment of uncertain weights of partnership selection criteria and uncertain scores of alternative partners, in the basic framework of the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The proposed fuzzy prioritisation method uses interval pairwise comparison judgements rather than exact numerical values of the comparison ratios and transforms the initial prioritisation problem into a linear program. The method can derive priorities from inconsistent interval comparison matrices, thus eliminating the drawbacks of the existing interval prioritisation methods. Moreover, the method generalises the known prioritisation methods, since it can be used for deriving priorities from exact, interval or mixed comparison matrices, regardless of their consistency. A numerical example, illustrating the application of this method to partnership selection process is given.

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.