An enterprise architecture framework for collaboration of virtual enterprise chains

Abstract

The competitive power in the dynamically changing business environment has moved from individual enterprises to virtual enterprise chains. The collaboration of enterprises in a virtual enterprise chain requires that all of the enterprise elements should interact efficiently with each other based upon a virtual framework. However, any efficient framework for the collaboration is not introduced yet due to the incompatibility problem which stems from the inherent complexity of diverse enterprise elements. This paper introduces a new framework, the Virtual Enterprise Chain Collaboration Framework (VECCF), to guide enterprises to promote their collaboration efforts by addressing the incompatibility problem of enterprise elements. VECCF focuses on three aspects of enterprise elements which are capturing the different views of the collaboration: business processes, application software, and enabling technologies. In addition, the structure of VECCF conforms to OMG's metamodel architecture so that the enterprise models can be extended to specific value chains when it is necessary. The enterprise models of a design chain and a supply chain are applied to VECCF and then integrated into a merged value chain to verify the adaptability and the extensibility of the proposed framework.