CLASSIFICATION OF VIRTUAL ENTERPRISES

Virtual enterprise (VE) is a temporary alliance of businesses that come together to share skills or core competencies and resources in order to better respond to business opportunities, and whose cooperation is supported by computer networks. It is a manifestation of distributed collaborative networks. A virtual enterprise is a particular case of virtual organization.

CLASSIFICATION OF VIRTUAL ENTERPRISES

A large number of diversified networked organizations of enterprises fall under the general definition of VE. However, by nature, these organizations require diversified panoply of supporting functionality within the VE. There is clearly a need to first classify different VE paradigms in terms of their characteristics and perspective requirements, before the paradigm can be properly addressed and modeled.

A first basic classification according to a number of characteristics such as the duration, topology, coordination, and visibility scope, has been introduced in (Afsannanesh and Camarinha-Matos, 1997) and (Camarinha-Matos and Afsannanesh, 1998).

A suggested approach

• Duration. Some alliances of enterprises are established towards a single business opportunity, and are dissolved at the end of such process. This situation corresponds perhaps to the most typical kind of virtual enterprise, for which examples can be found in large scale engineering systems, such as, a construction consortium involved in building a one of a kind bridge or a railway. But there are also long term alliances that last for an indefinite number of business processes or for a specified long-term time span. In most cases of supply chains in food industry or in the automotive industry it is more common to find long term alliances.
• Topology. There are situations that show a variable / dynamic nature, in which some enterprises (non strategic partners) can dynamicaI:y join or leave the alliance according to the phases of the business process or other market factors. But in many sectors there exist established supply chains with an almost fIXed structure (little variation in terms of suppliers or clients during the VE life cycle).
• Participation. Another facet to be considered is the possibility of either an enterprise participating simultaneously in multiple alliances, or being dedicated to a single alliance (exclusivity membership). In the non-exclusive case, the supporting infrastructure must handle various virtual participation spaces and to cope with strict cooperation and information visibility rules, to preserve the requirements of every individual enterprise.

Other approaches

Other classifications may be found in the literature based on a different set of perspectives. For instance, in (Thoben and Jagdev, 1999) a classification based on the types of bilateral relationships between different companies is provided, leading to the following classes: supply chain, extended enterprise, and virtual enterprise. The same authors give another perspective based on the autonomy of the cooperation, classifying the organizations into: agreement oriented, exchange oriented, and joint venture.

References:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_enterprise

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-0-387-35577-1_1.pdf