click on star to go back to Joseph Sarkis' HomepageThe managerial and organization practices required by an increasingly dynamic competitive manufacturing, business, and industrial environment include the formation of "virtual enterprises." A major concern in the management of virtual enterprises is the integration and coordination of business processes contributed by partner enterprises. Traditional methods of process modeling currently used for the design of business processes do not fully support the needs of the virtual enterprise. The design of these virtual enterprises impose requirements that make it more complex than conventional intra-organizational business process design. This paper first describes an architecture that assists in the design of the virtual enterprise. The paper then discusses Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as a methodology for modeling and designing virtual organizations. While BPR presents many useful tools, the approach itself and the modeling tools commonly used to accomplish redesign have fundamental shortcomings when dealing with the virtual enterprise. There are, however, several innovative modeling approaches that provide promise for this problem. The paper discusses some of these innovative modeling approaches such as object-oriented modeling of business processes, agent modeling of organizational players, and the use of ontological modeling to capture and manipulate knowledge about the players and processes. The paper concludes with a conceptual modeling methodology that combines these approaches under the enterprise architecture for the design of virtual enterprises.
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