69 research outputs found
Low-Cost Broadband Connections: A Key Factor for SME Virtual Organizations
In an open global market, SMEs are facing new challenges while trying to compete with large worldwide corporations. The forming of innovative alliances, known as virtual organizations (VO), is one of the most interesting proposals to achieve competitiveness and exploit strategic advantages. However, besides the obvious positive potential of innovative actions like VOs, there are several drawbacks, especially when SMEs are involved in such projects. VOs have very high needs for IT and communications; in fact they rely so much on them that the forming of a VO is only possible with the development of an extensive information and communication infrastructure. A lot of innovating management, re-forming and re-structuring is involved in joining several independent companies into a new virtual schema and several cultural, economical and legislative problems must also be overcome. In this paper we focus on the technological needs, and in particular, the need for an organization-wide data sharing and communication network. The high cost involved with the investments necessary in IT and communications technology make the effort harder for SMEs, even if it was to be assumed that they could manage the other important aspects of forming a VO. Along with the cost of computer equipment and specialized software, networking cost has until recently been a particularly prohibiting factor for SMEs even on the most advanced business sectors. A new term, the “virtual organization technology threshold†is introduced, defined as the minimum of IT and communication technologies necessary to form a “true†virtual organization, in its pure and functional form described and widely adopted by the scientific community. The investments needed for IT and communications to form a VO are analyzed and compared to the related investments of conventional SMEs in EU. The evolution in the cost, focused around the networking tools, is then examined to extract useful information about the feasibility of such specialized investments compared to the overall investment and turnovers of typical SMEs. We then argue that a recent development, the price drop and wide spread of broadband connections can act as a “key factor†that could make the difference in lowering the “threshold†and increasing the possibilities for SMEs to compete successfully by utilizing technological advantages and innovations that have until now considered to be more suitable for larger enterprises.
VALIDATING COOPERATIVE SYSTEMS SIMULATION AND REMODELING FOR PUMP COVER DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING IN A VIRTUAL ENTERPRISE
In order to integrate the manufacturing systems in virtual environment some changes must be made in manufacturing systems architecture. To support this environment, the basic infrastructure for the enterprise must to consider two main modules: The Internal Module, that represents the autonomous unit of a particular company and includes the manufacturing system, the complete structure of the company information (databases, information system etc.) and all the decision making processes;virtual enterprise, manufacturing systems, remodeling, simulation, cooperative systems
ACUTA eNews December 2010, Vol 39, No. 12
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An extensible manufacturing resource model for process integration
Driven by industrial needs and enabled by process technology and information technology, enterprise integration is rapidly shifting from information integration to process integration to improve overall performance of enterprises. Traditional resource models are established based on the needs of individual applications. They cannot effectively serve process integration which needs resources to be represented in a unified, comprehensive and flexible way to meet the needs of various applications for different business processes. This paper looks into this issue and presents a configurable and extensible resource model which can be rapidly reconfigured and extended to serve for different applications. To achieve generality, the presented resource model is established from macro level and micro level. A semantic representation method is developed to improve the flexibility and extensibility of the model
Virtual Organizations in Practice: A European Perspective
The paper reports results from a European Union (EU) project dedicated to Virtual Organization (VO) research. It aims to consolidate VO reference models and related modeling methodologies based on experiences acquired in thirty relevant EU funded research projects. The research reveals the complex reality of deployment and adoption of VO practices and identifies a number of organizational, legal, economic, socio-cultural, and technical challenges faced by VOs, presented in the form of open questions for the research community
Proactive services ecosystem framework
Dissertation presented to obtain the degree of
Doctor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, specialization on Collaborative Enterprise NetworksCollaborative-Networks (CN) have experienced a fast evolution in the last two decades. The
collaboration among independent entities or professionals supported by Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) has attracted the research community to establish the
conceptual basis for this scientific discipline. Service Orientation has been one of the key selected paradigms for that conceptual basis. Nevertheless, the service concept itself does not have a common understanding in the Business and ICT worlds. In the former, client satisfaction,
resources management and business process models are some example concerns, whilst the later deals with interoperability, remote function calling or communication protocols.
If for example an enterprise provides some service, it may hire specialists to wrap such
service into web-services, expecting to reach worldwide potential new clients. In fact, nowadays Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are the technological elements most commonly used. However, these are passive elements in the sense they do not perform any action
towards pursuing business interests, which constitute a limiting factor from a business
perspective. Another approach for the above mentioned enterprise is to follow the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) approach, as the pro-activity is a keyword in such contexts. Nevertheless, as MAS approaches are not so commonly used and not so robust yet, the worldwide potential set of new clients is reduced; which also constitutes an inhibitor factor from the business perspective.
This dissertation proposes a Pro-Active Services Ecosystem Framework, gathering
inspiration from both the SOA and MAS research areas, trying to bridge the business and ICT worlds through the base concepts for the creation of a Services’ Ecosystem where business services are represented in a pro-active manner towards pursuing business interests, like finding
collaboration opportunities or improving the chances each CN member has to see its services selected among competitors, for example. This work also includes a prototype system applied / validated in the area of a Professional Virtual Community of Senior Professionals
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