The multi-site, multi-process and complex organisational structure of world-wide enterprises, as well as the introduction of the new concepts of extended and virtual enterprises, are determining increased needs of advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICT) facilities for improving team work and distributed working methods in engineering, manufacturing and production processes. This...

Since implementing B2B e-commerce in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is a long-term commitment and such enterprises are more limited in terms of resources than large enterprises, the predicted value of successful implementation is extremely useful in deciding whether to initiate B2B e-commerce. This investigation establishes an analytical hierarchy framework to help SMEs predicting implemen...

Enterprises which are distributed in space and/or which are composed as a temporary joint venture of legally different units recently often called virtual (extended) enterprises. Planning, design and operation (management) goals and requirements of such firms are generally different from those of single, centralised enterprises. The basic feature of a virtua) enterprise is that the co-operating...

This paper presents an empirical criterion for establishing privatization priorities for state-owned enterprises. The approach uses firm performance, defined as productive efficiency, as the basis for deciding the sequence in which firms are privatized. Sequencing is relevant because the order in which state enterprises are taken up for privatization has efficiency implications, and an appropri...

1. The new European Regulation on Structural Business Statistics (SBS) (March 2008) establishes that, in order to estimate information on the structure of National production systems, Member States (MS) can integrate data available in different information sources, including administrative data. Besides, due to budget restrictions, MS need to reduce statistical production costs while maintainin...

After the 2008 economic slowdown, and with increasing assault from enterprises from emerging economies, many innovative strategic leaders of multinational enterprises are forced to radically transform their enterprises. They often choose to change from low-cost strategy to innovation-driven product differentiation strategy. In this study, we use a multi-level Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) a...

Economical constraints impose to enterprises to regroup themselves into virtual enterprises to be more reactive. This association will create interdependencies between virtual enterprise processes, which can be a problem in case of a process failure, because such an issue can jeopardize the whole activity of the virtual enterprise. Thus, it seems relevant to set « survival » mechanisms enabling...

Cleaner Production is a comparatively new approach to dealing with environmental concerns and grasping the opportunities arising from those challenges. It aims at avoiding the generation of waste and emissions, by making more efficient use of materials and energy, through modifications in the production processes, input materials, operating practices and/or products and services. Although Clean...

Business model innovation (BMI) has become increasingly important, especially with fast changing business environment. While large enterprises approach these changes more or less systematically, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are left to their own resourcefulness. For the purpose of developing dedicated methods and tools to support different SMEs in addressing these challenges, we ha...

High availability of information in medium and large-sized enterprises may naturally benefit from a wide-area replication of data. We discuss recent developments of replication architectures that boost the availability of business data in distributed information systems.