When designing an IT platform aimed at supporting industrial Virtual Enterprises (VEs), certain issues related to information management requirements become especially challenging, such as the physical distribution of data, the enterprise autonomy and privacy enforcement, access rights to shared information, and data visibility levels, among others. In the ESPRIT project PRODNET II, a federated...

Although employee compensation reform in Chinese industrial sector has been discussed in the literature, the real changes in compensation system and pay practices have received insufficient attention and warrant further examination. This paper briefly reviews the preand post-reform compensation system, and reports the results of a survey of pay practices in the four major types of industrial en...

It is widely agreed that small scale enterprises (SSEs) used to play a crucial role in achieving the industrial and economic development. Though SSEs play indispensable economic role, studies are limited to analyze the external factors that affect the growth of SSEs independently. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to examine the effect of external firm factors influencing small scale ma...

Most of the interfaces which are designed to control or program industrial robots are complex and require special training for the user and the programmer. This complexity alongside the changing environment of small medium enterprises (SMEs) has lead to absence of robots from SMEs. The costs of (re)programming the robots and (re)training the robot users exceed initial costs of installation and ...