Structured engagement in the extended enterprise

Discusses the necessity for the conscious recognition of the phenomenon known as the extended enterprise; this demands that product, process and supply chain design are all considered simultaneously. Structure must be given to the extended enterprise in order to understand and manage it efficaciously. The authors discuss multiple perspectives for doing this, and employ the notions of “3‐dimensional concurrent engineering” and “holonic thinking” for conceiving what the structure may look like. Describes a current “action research” project that is investigating potential lead‐time reductions within an extended enterprise’s product introduction process. This aims to produce process visualisations, a framework for structuring and sychronising phases and stage‐gates within the extended enterprise, and a new simulation tool which will provide a synthetic distributed hypermedia network. These deliverables will be used to play strategic “games” to explore problem issues within the product introduction process that belongs to the extended enterprise, develop teamwork across autonomous companies, and ultimately, contribute to the design of future extended enterprise supply chains.