The Internet Encyclopedia (Volume 3)

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INTRODUCTION 569

Table 1Typical Characteristics of VE Partners in a Satellite Development Domain

Company name Location Skills Responsibilities

Design Corporation Houston, TX Space system designers Design the propulsion system

ASSEMTEC San Diego, CA Fabrication specialists Build various satellite subsystems

Process Consultants, Inc. Tampa, FL Manufacturing engineering Develop plans to manufacture

and assemble satellite and its parts

Satellite Design, Inc. Houston, TX Space system designers Design the cold gas, command,

and other modules

Agile Integrators Colorado Springs, CO Integration specialists Integration with launch bus and testing

Project Management Dayton, OH Project management Manage entire product development,

Consultants budget, oversee task progress, etc.

team formation and are willing to adopt leading-edge

technologies that facilitate collaboration among dis-

tributed teams. The trend to adopt common information

exchange standards such as XML (extensible markup lan-

guage) and STEP (standard for the exchange of product

design specifications) will continue. Today, most manu-

facturing organizations have indicated their disappoint-

ment at emerging standards of data exchange. While

there are many technical challenges in adopting data ex-

change standards, the major resistance to this adoption

comes from an unwillingness to change. The emergence

of open architecture-oriented practices and the success

of organizations today that have embraced such stan-

dards will have a definite impact on future trends and

practices.

Types of VEs

There are broadly two major categories of virtual en-

terprises, inter-nation and intra-nation VEs. Inter-nation

VEs (or simply international VEs) are those whose mem-

bers extend beyond national boundaries. For example,

consider the electronics-manufacturing domain. Project

integrators and design partner organizations may be lo-

cated in California while process engineering team mem-

bers and resources are in Texas; in addition, the actual

assembly and manufacturing activities can occur in vari-

ous countries in Asia (such as Taiwan or Singapore). In an

intra-nation VE, a consortium’s partners are within a spe-

cific nation’s boundaries. Figure 1 illustrates the concept

of an intra-national VE. Another example of VE partner-

ships and skills is provided in Table 1. In both categories,

the Internet can serve as the communication backbone

linking the VE members. There needs to be a demarca-

tion between companies who merely have subcontractors

in various parts of the world (who may manufacture or

assemble parts of a final product) and companies who

use the Internet to exchange and share information that

directly influences the collaborative activities involved. A

manufacturing giant based in California may claim to be

part of a global network and yet not function as a true

VE. Globalization does not mean just using the Internet

or any other electronic means to exchange information.

Numerous organizations claim being part of a global net-

work and function more as quasi-VEs and in some situa-

tions, mainly subcontract a portion of their activities be-

cause of lower manufacturing and other costs. Supplier

chain management is one domain in which adoption of

Internet-based approaches has proven to be successful.

Data exchange has been less of a problem in this domain

and this has enabled the adoption of Internet-based prac-

tices to support activities related to this domain.

Importance of the Emerging VE Model

and the Role of the Internet

At the onset of this new millennium, manufacturing orga-

nizations worldwide are collaborating and functioning as

a virtual enterprise. With revolutionary advances in infor-

mation technology (IT) and electronic communications

serving as catalysts, the Internet has emerged as a power-

ful integration vehicle for the realization of the global mar-

ketplace. Private and government organizations have rec-

ognized the potential of the Internet as a VE facilitator and

have begun to implement distributed collaboration ap-

proaches using the Internet as a backbone. In this context,

there have been several research and industry initiatives

that have sought to focus on the development of innova-

tive integration frameworks to support distributed collab-

orative activities. The term “distributed design, planning,

and manufacturing” refers broadly to a subset of VE activ-

ities, where physically distributed design, planning, and

manufacturing resources interact with each other across

heterogeneous computer systems (or platforms) to ac-

complish identified manufacturing tasks. These resources

can include personnel (such as design or manufacturing

engineers), software tools (used to create design, man-

ufacturing plans, etc), computer systems (on which the

software tools reside), and machines (including robots,

assembly and metal cutting equipment, etc).

The development of a product can occur in multiple

phases referred to as the product development life cycle.

Typically, a life cycle (LC) of a product includes conceptu-

alization of a design idea, detailed design and engineering

analysis, project planning, manufacturing and assembly

planning, supply chain management, manufacturing (or

fabrication), testing, service, delivery and, retirement or

recycling (Figure 2). In today’s global economy, the com-

plex life-cycle activities involved in developing a product

are being performed in a distributed manner (see Fig-

ure 1). The project teams, software tools, analysis mod-

els, and manufacturing resources involved in this cycle

are also becoming increasingly distributed and are im-

plemented on heterogeneous computing systems, which