Extended and networked enterprises distribute the design of products, planning of the production process, and manufacturing regionally if not globally. The usual face-to-face work is going to be replaced, at least partly, if not totally, by computer mediated collaboration. Awaited are reduced problems of resolution cycle time, increasing productivity and agility, and reduced travel to remote si...

Lifetime distributions of social entities, such as enterprises, products, and media contents, are one of the fundamental statistics characterizing the social dynamics. To investigate the lifetime distribution of mutually interacting systems, simple models having a rule for additions and deletions of entities are investigated. We found a quite universal lifetime distribution for various kinds of...

The material requirement planning (MRP) process is crucial when software packages, like enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, are used in the production planning for manufacturing enterprises to ensure that appropriate quantities of raw materials and subassemblies are provided at the right time. Whereas little attention has been paid to the architectural aspects of MRP process in academi...

The applications of ICT in enterprises are many and well known. However, many small enterprises do not integrate ICT. So, the Greek government decided to promote the integration of ICT in these businesses. The aim of the present paper is to describe this nation-wide training system for employees of very small enterprises on the uses of ICT, which presents certain peculiarities. The wide dispers...

Much work has been done on the efficiency and management development of enterprises in China since the implementation of economic reforms. It has been argued that the problem of skills incompentence of the workforce is one of the fundamental factors hindering the overall performance of enterprises in China, particularly the state-owned enterprises. At the same time, low efficiency performance w...

In this paper we assume a competitive marketplace where the features are developed by different enterprises, which cannot or will not exchange information. We present a classification of feature interaction in this setting and introduce an online technique which serves as a basis for the two novel hybrid approaches presented. These approaches are hybrid as they are neither strictly off-line nor...

Virtual Enterprises (VEs) use software agents (SAs) to reduce costs, speed up operations, and increase efficiency and competitiveness. Agents can carry out negotiations and make contracts without any human intervention. This makes them useful both in negotiations to set up a VE and in contracting with VE partners. Agents raise legal problems about the relevance and validity of their actions. Th...

The paper approaches the problem of analyzing complex industrial bodies like the clusters of enterprises in order to evaluate their performances. The analysis is based on a formal model of a cluster of SMEs, represented in terms of its structure, its organization and its interactions with the outside.The paper aims at giving a comprehensive presentation of the evaluation approach to network org...

Collaboration has become an important goal in modern ventures, across the spectrum of commercial, social, and intellectual activities, sometimes as a mediating factor, and sometimes as a driving, foundational principle. Research, development, social programs, and ongoing ventures of all sorts benefit from interactions between teams, groups, and organizations, across intellectual disciplines and...

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) connects the benefit of service-oriented architecture and business process modelling by using standard control constructs to define the interactions between Web Services. The usage of predefined control constructs is efficient for production oriented business processes, but it leads to inflexible process models, which do not reach the challenges of...