Market of Resources for Agile/Virtual Enterprise Integration

Abstract

Fast change, uncertainty, and strong competition are challenges of the actual worldwide economic context. Competitiveness is a main requirement of enterprises, whose satisfaction requires the definition of new organisational concepts, with extremely high performances that are strongly time-oriented while highly focused on cost and quality. Several factors appear as supreme factors of competitiveness: (1) the organisations’ capability to achieve and explore competitive advantages in synergy, by using or integrating the optimal available resources for the functions that the organisation undertakes; (2) the capability of fast adaptability to the market; together with (3) the capability of managing all business processes independently of distance, to be achieved through the recent virtual enterprise (VE) organisational models (Cunha & Putnik, 2002; Cunha, Putnik, & Ávila, 2000).