Business collaboration – an approach towards end-to-end ICT solutions for virtual factory

Abstract

Business collaboration attracts substantial attention within manufacturing communities globally. Companies are collaborating with each other in order to achieve open innovation and for gaining business benefits. This specific research proposes a new business environment known as virtual factory, where similar type of companies form and execute business ecosystem. Such changed business environment demands for an end-to-end communication framework in order to obtaining status update between each other business processes. This research initiates an approach to the formation and execution of a virtual factory business environment that offers one of the important concepts and foundations central to the realization of future manufacturing environment. The virtual factory that is supported by the end-to-end integration of ICT technologies ensures a plug-and-play business process management functionality. In addition to, this research carried out an effort to look into the current researches on virtual collaborations, their inherent requirements and presented a communication framework between collaborative partners through ICT-enabled infrastructure. A case example is highlighted within the scope of this research with the objective to demonstrate and validate the presented communication framework that is to be implemented tomonitor andmanage virtual factory business processes successfully.