Management and production control issues of distributed enterprises

Abstract

Enterprises which are distributed in space and/or which are composed as a temporary joint venture of legally different units recently often called virtual (extended) enterprises. Planning, design and operation (management) goals and requirements of such firms are generally different from those of single, centralised enterprises. In this paper we suggest (software) solutions for design, planning and operation of complex, networked organisations represented as nodes of networks. First complex logistics flows of distributed SMEs are targeted, and then an European virtual institute for collaborative demand and supply network will be discussed. The third problem is a complex, web-based solution to manage large, expensive, multi-site, multi-company projects. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.