Because of e-commerce and the global economy, industries are challenged by world markets and modem enterprise morphologies, such as agile supply chains, expanded companies and virtual enterprises. Enterprises are thinking more and more about the market, customers and suppliers. Product quality is judged by the global market and the customers in the world village, and not only by the domestic market and customers. Enterprise quality assurance systems not only cover internal functional departments in an enterprise, but are expanding to external parties, such as customers, partners and suppliers, so, an expanded enterprise's core competencies or leadership capabilities in quality assurance have to be strengthened by the complementary capabilities of partners. The traditional quality assurance technologies have to be innovated. It is reasonable that "customer focus" and "mutually beneficial supplier relationships" blend into the core concepts of a quality management philosophy. As tools used by enterprises to support quality management, quality information management systems (QIMS) have to capture quality information from both internal and external parties, and to facilitate the communication environment, in order to share quality information among enterprises, customers and suppliers. Because of this, it is impossible for a traditional quality information management system based on the Intranet to meet these needs. In this paper, a model of the expanded enterprise is extended. A concept model and a functional model of the quality information management system based on Intemet/Extranet/Intranet (IEI-QIS) are proposed. The system is able to integrate quality information from the enterprise, product customers and suppliers, and serves as a powerful tool to benefit the quality management of modem enterprises. A browser/server-based and the three-layer system architecture of IEI-QIS are also investigated.
