Grouping the activities in virtual enterprise paradigm

• Published in: Production planning & control Vol. 13; no. 4; pp. 407 - 415
• Main Authors: Wu, Naiqi, Sun, Jian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 01.06.2002
• Subjects: Activity Grouping; Agile Manufacturing
• ISSN: 0953-7287; 1366-5871
• DOI: 10.1080/09537280210131567

A virtual enterprise is a temporary alliance of enterprises and is created to share the core resources owned by the partners in the virtual enterprise. In creating a virtual enterprise for a business opportunity, the potential partners can be searched through the communication infrastructure. In order to be successful in searching the partners, the role for each potential partner to play must be appropriately determined in advance, in other words, the activities to be performed by each partner should be determined. Thus, the activities for the product should be appropriately grouped. The problem of activity grouping is addressed. To group the activities, the relationship of the activities is described, and the activities that require core resources are identified and these activities are called key-activities. Then based on the relationship of the activities, the activities that require no core resources are merged into the key-activities such that each group of activities requires one type of core resources. Thus, each partner can perform one or more group of activities.