Abstract
To support the requirements for the new organizational forms of enterprises, the cooperative work and work groups approach has appeared. Cooperative work may be defined as one where a group of people, physically separated or not, articulate the accomplishment of a common task in a synchronous or asynchronous form. In order to cooperate, a previous agreement should be considered. All should be committed to work to reach a common objective (Borges, 1995). It is supposed that the agility, that is, dynamics, with which these work groups may be created and reconfigured, makes it possible to use the best “resources,” the (best) individuals capable to add value to one defined task, independently of their (the individuals’) (geographic) location and, consequently, contribute to the product and process quality. In that sense, it is supposed that application of virtual enterprise (VE) organizational principles contributes to the agility of the work teams, that is, to the concurrent engineering (CE) work teams, or team work, organization.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Virtuality: Is introduced with the ojective of further improvement of the performance of an agile enterprise, i.e., virtuality should provide the system with the capacity of re-configurability during the udergoing operation (on-line reconfigurability) without the interruption of the operation, and in the way improving the “response” time.f
Broker: Element to be answerable to obtain necessary resources for execution of tasks, integrating selected resources and reconfigure dynamically teams.
Integrability: Is considered the capacity of an enterprise to access (interconnect) existing heterogeneous resouces.
Resource: Is an object that it ises to conduct or support the excution of one or more processes (e.g., materials, machines, tools, computers, human operators, time, money, software, etc.)
Quality of Code: It is the evaluation of conformity of written code, based on international standards and agencies (ISO/OSI, W3C, PHP.NET).
Product: Development Lead Time: It is the time used by each team in the construction of each one of the six screens/pages that compse the Site.
Load Time: It is the time that each section of the site takes to be loaded on the customer’s terminal (the anonymous user that accesses the site through the Internet) from the server.
Agility: Is a capability for fast adaptability or fast reconfigurability in order to respond to the market changes.
Concurrent Engineering: Concurrent engineering is a business strategy which replaces the traditional product development process with one in which tasks are done in parellel and there is an early consideration for every aspect of a product’s development process.
Distributivity: Is considered as the capacity of an enterprise has of integrating and operating needed resources at a distance, remotely.