Interaction Mechanisms and Functional Needs for One-of-a-Kind Production in Inter-enterprise Settings

In one-of-a-kind production industries, different entities join to share complementary competencies to deliver a unique product or service. This is typically through the modus operandi of the virtual enterprise (VE). Information exchange in VE settings has traditionally been through simple file exchange using a person-to-person exchange. This has naturally led to a significant degree of information redundancy and unawareness of as to whom possesses the latest version. A move towards project servers has been noticeable since quite some time. While this does resolve the redundancy issue, in essence one has to manually upload documents to a central location and that too done at a person level. As such, the organisation has no control as to whom is publishing what content. In the GLOBEMEN project, it is advocated that information exchange (upload and download) be done through links between enterprise systems and store in a central repository which also supports specific VE services. The paper presents an overview of different inter-enterprise mechanisms for one-of-a-kind production and discusses some basic functional requirements to be made available to participants engaged in a VE setting. The findings of this paper are primarily based on undertakings related to distributed engineering within the GLOBEMEN project. 1 To be presented as, “Inter-enterprise Inter-naction Mechanisms and Functional Needs for One-of-aKind Production”, at eSM@RT 2002, November 19-21, University of Salford, UK. 1. The GLOBEMEN Project