Virtual factories for sustainable business performance through enterprise portal

Abstract

Sustainable business has become a valuable way to achieve competitive advantage and improve business performance. Virtual enterprise (VE), as a new business collaboration form, used to fulfil unique business requirements and make sure small- and medium-sized enterprises can adapt themselves to the modern business environment under increasing pressure towards sustainability. However, an advanced information management system is demanded for collaborative enterprises to share valuable knowledge and expertise. Enterprise portal (EP) plays a significant role to develop and maintain integrated environments for collaborative business, which makes it to approach VE for sustainable business performance. This research introduces a new form of factories collaboration, namely Virtual Factory, and also expresses EP and how it provides integrated services in the industry manufacturing domain. Therefore, an open source EP, Liferay, is selected. This Virtual Factory portal (ViFa portal) enables different factories meet their manufacturing targets and provides a single tool for all factories to access the real-time manufacturing information and products information. Two case companies are included to demonstrate the ViFa portal and its overall functionalities and capabilities. This research offers a significant method to improve the manufacturing processes and increase the ability to share information across different factories.

Keywords:

• virtual factory
• sustainability
• enterprise portal
• collaborative work
• computer supported system

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the co-funding of the European Commission in NMP priority of the Seventh RTD Framework Programme (2007–2013) for the ADVENTURE project (Adaptive Virtual Enterprise Manufacturing Environment), Ref. 285220. The authors also acknowledge the valuable collaboration provided by the project team during the research work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.