Primary challenges

    The recent efforts devoted to the development of infrastructures, mechanisms, and tools to support virtual enterprises (VE) are considerable, both at the national level in various countries and at the international cooperation level. As a result, considerable progress has been achieved, but there are still a large number of open issues requiring further developments and cooperation.

    In spite of the fact that most of the initial projects are focused on the development of VE infrastructures, various aspects remain without proper solution among which the following cases can be mentioned (Camarinha-Matos, Afsarmanesh, 1999):

§             Standards for information exchange. The use of EDIFACT and STEP, including the interoperation between the two standards, is a common practice, but there are many other types of information, that are required to be exchanged within VEs, but are not properly addressed by these standards. That is the case of quality/certificate-related information, monitoring information for distributed business process management, electronic catalogs information, enterprise competencies / skills / capabilities models, contract  terms and regulations information, and many other VE functionality related information.

§             Full life cycle supporting functionalities. In former developments most emphasis has been assigned to the operational phase of the VE. A few projects have also developed some functions to support the VE creation and its configuration / re-configuration phase, although much more work is necessary here. Namely, in terms of the VE agreement negotiation and decision making support tools, distributed business process planning and scheduling, configuration of coordination mechanisms based on the contractual clauses established among companies, etc. Regarding the VE dissolution phase the subject is almost not touched by current projects and many support functionalities need to be developed.

§            Supporting the enterprise applications. The enterprise applications (PPC, ERP, CAD, PDM, etc.) are both the main sources and consumers of the information that is interchanged among the VE partners. Therefore, on one hand the interface mechanisms between these systems and the VE infrastructure must improve, and on the other hand these applications themselves need to be better adjusted to support the VE activities. The following two points require further research:

a.                            Interaction with enterprise applications.

b.                            Re-engineering and extension of the applications functionalities.

§                Safe communications and independence of the channels. Although this is one of the most active development areas in electronic business, there is a need for simplification and standardization of mechanisms, making them available as basic services of the underlying network infrastructure.

An important aspect in the area of infrastructures is the “geographical independence”. As a VE may involve members in different geographical regions, even in different continents, there are obvious advantages in aiming at a wider standardization of the basic levels of the infrastructure. To achieve this goal, there is a need to identify the basic level of functionalities that are needed to become common practice, which also motivates a more global international cooperation. Solutions developed for one particular region are not necessarily easily adaptable to other regions due to the many technological, cultural and business practice differences. An IFIP sponsored initiative can contribute to the “harmonization” of the available disperse initiatives towards some form of common reference model and cooperation infrastructure.

It is also natural that real business practices and processes will change as a result of their first experiences on virtual enterprises. As a result new requirements will emerge and new supporting functionalities must be developed. Not only new tools and applications will be required, but also all the traditional enterprise applications (ERP, PPC, PDM, CAD, CAPP, etc.) must be “re-visited” in order to take into account the networked cooperative environments.

New forms of organization of cooperation and new business scenarios are likely to emerge, that will require new conceptual and technological developments. Complementarily there is a need for more interaction between the technological developments and the socio-organizational issues and legal aspects. The social and organizational impacts of these new paradigms require a careful analysis not only to guarantee a smooth implantation, but also to guide the developments in the more adequate directions.

Added-value of an IFIP initiative

    It is obvious that the very limited resources of IFIP cannot support comprehensive R&D; therefore the proposed project is more a “concerted action” type of initiative trying to raise synergies from the interactions among real R&D projects financed by other sources.

  By creating a forum for knowledge sharing and exchange of experiences, COVE expects to bring the following benefits:

-                                 Comparison of approaches and practices

-                                 Efforts toward common reference models

-                                 Framework for further international cooperation (supported by national or regional funding programs)

-                                 Discussion forum for the interested professionals and students

-                                 Dissemination agency, raising awareness

-                                 For students

-                                 For researchers

-                                 For industrialists

-                                 Database of best practice cases

-                                 Promote interactions among PhD students in the field

-                                 Propose a PhD model program.