Co-ordination of SME production through a co-operative network

Today, industrial production steps outside the boundaries of individual enterprises, so new management approaches are needed to be able to co-ordinate the work of the different manufacturing organizations. A new co-operative manufacturing network model is proposed for balancing the production of SMEs, based on the holonic paradigm. The model has been developed within the framework of an ESPRIT project by four countries. The paper describes the main modules of the model and briefly introduces an application under realization in Hungary, in an agricultural SME network.