Vision E-Company: The Network-Centric Enterprises

Abstract

The Vision e-Company Research Program investigates how information exchanges, oUl-sourcillg and process cooperation will change professiollal links within and betweell busillesses and determille the standards, which will become the norm in e-business. This paper gives an overview of the projects launched in the scope of this program and presellts their maill results concernillg extended and virtual enterprises. It introduces in particular: a communication services infrastructures for collaborative processes that reduces the information overflow within horiZOlltal ellterprise organizations, several ways for sharing and illtegrating customer knowledge, a portal for buildillg virtual enterprises through partllerships, a method for analyzing the impact of ellterprises e-transformatiolls, all infrastructure for hostillg and managillg business processes of Small and Medium Ellterprises (SME). L. M. Camarinha-Matos et al. (eds.), Processes and Foundations for Virtual Organizations © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004 56 PROCESSES AND FOUNDATIONS FOR VIRTUAL ORGANIZATIONS The Vision e-Company program has launched four 3-year projects) in 2001, called e-Infovalue, e-Customer, e-Contract and e-Process. They are correspondingto key problems in extended and virtual enterprises (Hedberg and Holmqvist, 2000) such as finding trust partners, avoiding electronic information overload, going from Business to Business (B2B) data exchange to B2B processes interoperability, managing customer relationship and sharing customer knowledge. The Vision e-Company program has developed a concept of network centric enterprises illustrated in figure-l apprehending these key problems. e-Contract