Manufacturing Enterprises Value Chain Model Analysis within the Context of the Network Economy

Manufacturing enterprises in the future will have to survive and develop in the network economy with the development of information and network communication technology, the globalization of economy, and the interaction of these two factors. Nowadays the business environments which manufacturing enterprises are facing are very complicated and volatile. The traditional coordinating relationships between operation models of manufacturing enterprises and their business environment have already been changed as a result of globalization, informatization and personalization of customers’ needs. New coordinating relationships are in the process of forming. Concerning operations management in manufacturing enterprise, traditional management theories and methods only confined to the solving of problems within the boundaries of individual enterprise. The introduction of supply chain management makes people considering enterprise problems in a larger context, but most researchers in this field pay more attention to tactic issues. Typical solutions are methods such as postponed manufacturing, information sharing and interests sharing. The systematic and strategic analysis of the supply chain is ignored. Systematic analysis approach is adopted in this paper. We start our work from the analysis of environment, objective, and structure of supply chain system. Porter’s value chain model is then studied and its limitations under new circumstances are pointed out. On the basis of the work described above, we analyze the features of network economy and explore the new value chain model for manufacturing enterprise in the network economy. Finally an empirical case study is conducted.