Virtual enterprise networks & virtual teams: a business management approach.

Dragoi, George ; Cotet, Costel Emil ; Dragomirescu, Cristian 等

1. INTRODUCTION

The ability of companies to form global networks on the Internet will transform the way that we do business in the future. Service-oriented computing is becoming the prominent paradigm for leveraging inter-enterprise information systems to complete higher-order business transactions at the heart of the modus operandi of the virtual enterprise (VE). This paper describes research aimed at supporting the formation and operations of virtual enterprises through the setting-up of service-oriented workspace environments. Today, the Challenge in the world is of the change agents in the countries and through its technological and social components, has among one of its objectives, to accelerate the digital economy's development process in businesses, especially the micro, small and medium ones, for increasing the competitiveness of economy; as well as develop a digitalization culture in society, particularly in the consumers (Dragoi, 2005).

As the e-economy evolves, we must reexamine our beliefs about what can be achieved. New ideas and consumer demand trigger new business opportunities, which proliferate so rapidly that three months in the e-economy is considered the equivalent of a full year in a traditional business development cycle. More than two thirds of businesses now have a web presence that offers product or catalog information for customer convenience. However, few organizations have really taken the trouble to find out what their channel partners need in terms of rapid information deployment to better manage the supply chain.

To grasp how the e-economy will affect your business, you need to think about how web technology is going to transform your relationship with your customers. During the next years, the supply chain model of the e-economy will bear little resemblance to today's model. Competitive forces and new technology will continuously alter the shape and flow of commerce (IBM, 2005). First, most ERP systems are, in the very nature of their design, focused on the manufacturing link of the supply chain. Yet, a fundamental shift in thinking is beginning to concentrate on the demand side of the supply chain. The critical difference: demand chain thinking starts with the customer and works in reverse. The new approach acknowledges that customers have individual needs and service requirements. Another problem with most ERP business models is their inability to work seamlessly within an organization to handle some of the critical links of the supply chain process. The net result of awkward integration into other business systems within the supply chain has created a new industry of Integration Service Providers (ISPs) that link ERP systems. New ways of sharing information are gaining acceptance. We propose to the above issues is the systematic study of nature's most successful living teams and the extraction of principles about their operational logistics, behavior patterns, commandstructure, communication methods that can provide us with useful guidelines on how teams need to operate to be truly successful. It is our goal to analyze these principles and to see where and how some of the teaming principles can be transferred to the areas of organizational design, leadership, online collaboration, business networking, and human resources management. The solution is a virtual enterprise network (VEN):

* A way for businesses to achieve virtual scale enabling them to operate as if they had more resources and capacity than they actually have;

* Allowing them to operate with all the resources and reach of a large enterprise but without sacrificing their speed, agility and low overheads;

* Enabling them to compete for bigger more profitable contacts with higher innovation and design elements with bigger customers who are prepared to have strategic partnerships with their suppliers (Rosu & Draghici, 2008).

2. VIRTUAL TEAMS & VEN

Virtual collaboration for networked business teams is a complex and challenging activity in which there are major important components to be accounted for. Virtual business teams do not operate like traditional physical teams, as their requirements reflect a completely new way of communicating, working collaboratively, sharing information and mutually supporting other team members. A Virtual Enterprise Network needs its own Private Member Collaboration System to communicate and develop its projects and bids. It needs its distinctive Network Business Applications such as Capability Aggregation and Tender Matching to enable it to function effectively as a co-operative in both pre-sales and contract operations. It also needs a Public Web Site to manage its interactions with potential customers and new members(Rosu & al., 2007). In this context, the basic ingredients of VEN are presented in the figure 1.

The new technologies and approaches required to achieve this are completely alien to most of our present organizational culture. Moreover, this is why they fail. Cooperative processes are not the automatic results of implementing collaborative, real-time communication technologies, but the result of a carefully designed and systematically maintained virtual team development plan.

For those of you who have already exposed themselves to the positive advantages made available by the use of cutting-edge communication and collaboration technologies, this should sound as a familiar melody.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Why is there so much disjoint between technology potential and the productive use that business team members make of them? (Dragoi, 2005). If the solution is not in the technology enabling such networked business teams to easily interoperate, where is it then? The ideal solution framework suggests making a systematic pragmatically reference to the key interdependent components of a successful virtual business team--each of which must be set-up correctly and then kept in constant equilibrium as the team evolves and produces results.

3. A BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT APPROACH

The term Business Process Management (or BPM) is a set of activities that organizations can perform to either optimize their business processes or adapt them to new organizational needs (Botezatu & al., 2006). As software tools usually aid these activities, the term BPM is synonymously used to refer to the software tools themselves. BPM activities are process design, process execution, and process monitoring. Business driven development starts with modeling, then goes through implementation and testing, deployment to a server, and monitoring of the executing processes. BPM is about service assembly, where applications are assembled from components. WebSphere Business Modeler can generate them, or they can be developed using tools such as Rational Software Architect and Rational Application Developer (IBM, 2005).

We start with modeling the current system using WebSphere Business Modeler V6. In this phase, we create all the resources needed by our application like timetables, human resources, data arrays, etc. We also define simple business measures such as key performance indicators (KPIs) which we want to verify in the final application trough monitoring.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

We export the process model for implementation. In the second phase, we implement the process model as an enterprise application in WebSphere Integration Developer. This can be done even with minimal programming knowledge. We have to complete certain tasks by developing business rules, Java code, and a user interface for human tasks. The interface is very friendly and a basic GUI (Graphic User Interface) is created. Those default pages created for each human task can be further customized in order to facilitate the end user control.

We export the application for deployment into the Process Server. As part of development and testing we use the Monitor Development Toolkit, a plug-in in WID (WebSphere Integration Developer), to define the business measures (KPIs, alerts). We test the basic functionality of this monitor model using a Monitor Server test environment (see figure 2). In the third phase, we run the application in WebSphere Process Server. During the execution, events are captured and sent for monitoring.

In the fourth phase, we deploy the monitor model to the WebSphere Business Monitor, which then processes the events of the Process Server. The Monitor Dashboard is used to display the business measures and KPIs to a business analyst. In the fifth phase, we use the results of monitoring to compare the results with the model. Based on the analysis we modify the model and start a new cycle of implementation, deployment, and monitoring. This way even complex business models can be analyzed and optimized before they are implemented in real life situations. The process integration portfolio provides capabilities required for the delivery of the comprehensive enterprise wide business process management strategies and solutions. It offers a holistic approach to transform and manage a business by aligning strategic and operational objectives with business activities and supporting IT services.

4. CONCLUSIONS

The presented solution is based on ORGVIRT platforms that defines a standard for developing multi-tier, portable and platform neutral enterprise applications based on the technology of Web Services. Striving to discover the main problems of collaborative product data management, the theoretical backgrounds in the particular research area were analyzed, and interviews with the members of the design departments of SMS companies were carried out.

5. REFERENCES

Botezatu, C.P., Botezatu, C. & Caruasu G. (2006). The development and the implementation of the integrated management system, Annals of DAAAM for 2006 & Proceedings of the 17th International DAAAM Symposium, pp. 053-054, 2006, ISSN 1726-9679, ISBN 3-901509-57-7

Dragoi, G., (2005), Informational Infrastructure of modern enterprise (Infrastructura informaiionala si de comunicatii a imtreprinderii moderne), Editura POLITEHNICAPRESS, ISBN 973-8449-73-1, Bucuresti, Romania.

IBM Software Development Platform, (2005), IBM Rational Software solutions, IBM Corporation, Bucharest, Romania

Rosu, S. M. & Draghici, A. (2008). Information system risk estimate as part of project development by virtual teams using expert systems, Academic Journal of Manufacturing Engineering, no. 2/2008, pp. 135-142, ISSN 1583-7904.

Rosu, S. M.; Draghici, A. & Guran, M. (2007). Knowledge Transfer in the Enterprise Business Intelligence, Annals of DAAAM for 2007 & Proceedings of the 18th International DAAAM Symposium, October 24th-27th, B. Katalinic (Ed.), published by DAAAM International, Vienna, Austria, pp. 647-648, ISBN 3-901509-58-5.