Globalisation together with technological advances have dramatically changed the process of value creation at the end of this century. Nowadays, more and more companies are being organised as networks of different units and are therefore becoming global businesses covering multiple manufacturing sites consisting of different shop floors, subcontractors and suppliers. The concept of Virtual Enterprise was born in this environment. The aim of this paper is to present the Virtual Enterprise as a new organisational paradigm and to explore the tight relationship with the information and communication technologies. Our research has shown that traditional enterprise information systems do not suitably cope with some of the new demanding requirements of a distributed and heterogeneous manufacturing environment. In this context, this paper presents a set of requirements that supports this new organisational paradigm.
virtual enterprise; network manufacturing; globalisation; ERP; SCM
