Global Engineering and Manufacturing in Enterprise Networks: GLOBEMEN

In one-of-kind production the products are usually large deliveries, like production plants, ships, telecommunication or other infrastructure systems. It is not possible for any enterprise to manufacture these products alone. Cooperation with other enterprises, often globally, is needed during the entire product life cycle. The IMS project GLOBEMEN was started to develop tools, methods and guidelines to support the creation, operation and management of enterprise networks and virtual enterprises (VE), which are the temporary cooperation forms to perform a specific task. GLOBEMEN has addressed three main aspects of manufacturing: sales and services, inter-enterprise delivery management and distributed engineering. In these life cycle phases tools and processes have been developed and tested in industrial cases. The findings have been integrated to an architectural framework called VERAM (Virtual Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology). The framework aims to offer handles that contribute to solving the problems that enterprises face when they want to cooperate in a Network and a Virtual Enterprise. The publication is the proceedings of the final conference of GLOBEMEN in December 2002 in Helsinki.