Re Engineering For Sustainable Industrial Production

In today's changing world, enterprises need to survive in an ever volatile competitive market environment. Their success will depend on the strategies they practice and adopt. Every year, new ideas and concepts are emerging in order for companies to become successful enterprises. Cross Border Enterprises is the new 'hot' topic arising in the business process world at present. Many terms have been coined together and are being driven in the popular business press to describe this new strategy of conducting business, ie. Extended Enterprise (Browne et al. , 1995; O'Neill and Sacket, 1994; Busby and Fan, 1993; Caskey, 1995), Virtual Enterprise (Goldmann and Preiss, 1991; Parunak, 1994; Goranson, 1995; Doumeingts et al. , 1995), Seamless Enterprise (Harrington, 1995), Inter-Enterprise Networking (Browne et al. , 1993), Dynamic Enterprise (Weston, 1996) and so on. Many people have argued that they mean the same thing, just using different words. Others feel they are different. But how different are they? In this paper the authors will present some basic lines required from this new strategy for conducting and coordinating distributed business processes (DBP), as well as trying to clarify the particularities of two of the widest spread terms related to it: Virtual and Extended Enterprise. 2 CLUSTERS OF PRESSURES The business world currently faces an increased trend towards globalisation, environmentally benign production and customisation of products and processes, forcing individual enterprises to work together across the value chain in order to cope with market influences.

This edited volume presents the proceedings of the 20th CIRP LCE Conference, which cover various areas in life cycle engineering such as life cycle design, end-of-life management, manufacturing processes, manufacturing systems, methods and tools for sustainability, social sustainability, supply chain management, remanufacturing, etc.

This book presents recent developments, research results, and industrial experience to increase the knowledge base of academics and industry. In a small world where trade is the new global driving force conquering countries and continents alike, international competitiveness is becoming the ultimate challenge. It requires high-quality products manufactured with state-of-the-art technologies at low cost under the assumption of highly efficient operations management as well as clear corporate goals and strategy. This in turn is based on improved engineering training and education, relevant applied research, and an active interaction between academia and industry.

Collaborative Networks for a Sustainable World Aiming to reach a sustainable world calls for a wider collaboration among multiple stakeholders from different origins, as the changes needed for sustainability exceed the capacity and capability of any individual actor. In recent years there has been a growing awareness both in the political sphere and in civil society including the bu- ness sectors, on the importance of sustainability. Therefore, this is an important and timely research issue, not only in terms of systems design but also as an effort to b- row and integrate contributions from different disciplines when designing and/or g- erning those systems. The discipline of collaborative networks especially, which has already emerged in many application sectors, shall play a key role in the implemen- tion of effective sustainability strategies. PRO-VE 2010 focused on sharing knowledge and experiences as well as identi- ing directions for further research and development in this area. The conference - dressed models, infrastructures, support tools, and governance principles developed for collaborative networks, as important resources to support multi-stakeholder s- tainable developments. Furthermore, the challenges of this theme open new research directions for CNs. PRO-VE 2010 held in St.

The area of virtual organizations, and industrial virtual enterprises in particular, is attracting a large and growing interest both in terms of the research and development and the implementation of new business practices. An ever-increasing number of international projects and national initiatives have been launched recently. Most of the earlier efforts are focused on the development of supporting infrastructures, although more and more initiatives now pursue the exploitation of this concept in business terms. Being a recent research and development area, and in spite of the mentioned interest, there is a lack of a structured and comprehensive text that can be used as a reference source. Most available literature is dispersed in several conference proceedings, journals, and book chapters. This book represents an attempt towards such structured text. Although the book was prepared in the framework of PRO-VE'99, a working conference on infrastructures for virtual enterprises organized by the Esprit project PRODNET II and IFIP, it has the goal of covering more generic VE requirements and addressing several other approaches and important aspects in this paradigm.

In the last half of the twentieth century industry encountered a revolutionary change brought about by the harnessed power of seemingly ever-increasing capacity, speed and functionality of computers and microprocessors. This strength provided management and workers within industries with new capabilities for management, planning and control, design, quality assurance and customer support. Organized information flow became the mainstay of industrial companies. New tools and information technology systems emerged and evolved to enable companies to integrate the various departments (Design, Procurement, Manufacturing, Sales and Finance) within companies, particularly the lager ones, including international corporations. This was to give them a chance to meet new demands for product time to market, just in time supply of orders, and customer support. To the smaller company these changes were not so apparent. Neither the tools nor systems nor indeed their economic value seemed appropriate to them except for special cases. While all this was happening the structure of the larger companies began to disintegrate. Strong competitive pressures and globalization of the market place brought this about. Shedding unwanted competence and subcontracting it to others became common practice. Regional market pressures triggered companies to reorganize to create, produce, and distribute goods and services. Greater dependency on chains of supply from external companies became the norm. Medium and smaller sized companies began to gain some advantage and at the same time some were sucked into management and control systems governed by the larger companies.

How can the Internet and world wide web improve my long-term competitive advantage? This book helps answer this question by providing a better understanding of the technologies, their potential applications and the ways they can be used to add value for customers, support new strategies, and improve existing operations. It is not just about e-commerce but the broader theme of e-business which affects products, business processes, strategies, and relationships with customers, suppliers, distributors and competitors. To cover future trends, the editors have collected papers from authors operating at the frontiers of the developments so the reader can more appreciate the directions in which these technologies are heading. The resulting 165 essays have been collated into ten sections, which have been grouped in three parts: key issues, applications areas and applications, tools and technologies. A business rarely makes radical changes but is constantly making adjustments to circumstances. Businesses must now adapt to the global implications of the Internet and world wide web. This book hopes to aid awareness of the implications so that the changes are managed wisely.