Capacity management requirements for virtual enterprises

Abstract

Transformations in the marketplace have led manufacturing companies to focus ontheir core competences and compete through new forms of enterprise partnerships. A newconcept of enterprise partnership is that of Virtual Enterprise wherein autonomous or independentcompanies come together to temporally address a specific market demand, by collaboratingclosely and presenting to the market as a single enterprise. A number of traditional operationsmanagement models or techniques need to be redesigned in order to cope with the demandsbrought by the implementation of the Virtual Enterprise concept.This paper attempts to ascertain the understanding that exist about the concept of VirtualEnterprise as well as its associated managerial challenges. Then, focusing on the issues ofmanufacturing capacity management, the requirements for an effective deployment of thisfunction in a Virtual enterprise environment are described.