A systematic approach of virtual enterprising through knowledge management techniques

Virtual enterprising is viewed as one of the most promising business strategies for manufacturing industries to meet global competition. The essence of virtual enterprising is to integrate the processes, activities, and resources from different enterprises through enterprise alliance and thereby quickly respond to customer expectations. The management and sharing of knowledge across enterprises is the basis for virtual enterprising. A development of a knowledge management and sharing system involves not only the technologies of communication, information, collaborative workflow and software engineering but also managing the characteristics and processes of a satellite set of allied-enterprises. The development of an effective knowledge management system is still a technical challenge for virtual enterprising. In this context, information and data sharing are considered parts of a knowledge management (KM) function. This paper presents a systematic approach to the development of a prototype knowledge management (KM) system that is able to support the intricacies of virtual enterprising. The prototype KM system development is done in two parts. The first part focuses on the characterization, definition, and modeling of virtual enterprises. The second part concentrates on design and modeling of an information sharing system. The output of the second part is a knowledge management (KM) system. A prototype version of KM is developed in this case to test the underlying two-part approach proposed here. The proposed approach is however, quite general and is directed towards realizing most of the concepts of virtual enterprise, and thus achieving the goals of virtual enterprising.