Virtual Enterprise Collaboration Hub (VEC-Hub)
VEC-Hub Concept
The concept of the Virtual Enterprise Collaboration Hub, VEC-Hub, meets the business requirements and forms a foundation for the operational environment of the Virtual Enterprise. This gives everyone, within the heterogeneous IT environment of the partners, the ability to securely and traceably find, consolidate and publish information and collaborate in a common context.
Figure 1. The VEC-Hub Conceptual Layout
The outer dashed circle of the conceptual layout figure 1 represents the portal front for the VEC-Hub area of interest providing (S)ervices for access, management and security. Outside of this area each collaboration peer maintains their private view on internal (P)roduct information, (O)rganisational roles and (W)ork processes.
Three main kinds of collaboration peers have been identified:
- Venture Partners that are capable of providing internal (P), (O) and (W) assets for collaboration
- SME Partners, Small to Medium sized Enterprise Partners with mainly commodity tools available for collaboration
- Services Partners that provide supplementary (S)ervices supporting the collaborative workflows
The inner dashed circle in the green area represent the core (S)ervices of the VEC-Hub that orchestrate the processes and information storage
The interior green area represents the common view on (P), (O), (W) and (R)eference data for the collaborative work
The area between the dashed circle and the interior green area is called the shared area of the VEC-Hub. Here directly integrated partners can communicate internal (P), (W), (O) information via supplementary (S)ervices in control by the VEC-Hub Portal services.
Business Drivers
Staying competitive in today’s business implies being able to operate and collaborate efficiently in a Virtual Enterprise1. This implies coping with the following challenges:
- The heterogeneous business network environment;
- Accessibility of the common collaboration context;
- Enabling a flexible network of partners;
- Requirements on traceability and storability;
- Ownership of data, methods and knowledge;
- Security, trust and legal aspects.
Figure 2. The Virtual Enterprise context
Business Requirements
By use and scale-up of emerging ICT methods and tools a collaboration environment to support the Virtual Enterprise can be developed. The requirements on the targeted collaborative solution include:
- A common agile set-up of partner roles, product information, work processes and reference data for the collaboration project;
- A neutral partnership collaboration platform with respect to technical, internal and external aspects;
- Partner to partner isolation via intermediate services communicating using neutral data structures;
- Accessibility via commodity technology such as web browsers to collaboration environment assets.
Supporting The Full Lifecycle
During the lifecycle of a product, the different VEC-Hub services support the shifting needs of each phase of the lifecycle in an agile way.
Figure 3: The VEC-Hub Concept supports the Virtual Enterprise during the full lifecycle of a business/product.
- Preparation phase: management of potential partners in a loosely coupled consortium;
- Proposal preparation and negotiation phase: managing products, processes, organisations;
- Product development phase: facilitating the interaction services that the specific collaboration need;
- Manufacturing and maintenance phase: supporting the supply chain and product support organisations.
Supported Business Needs
- To ensure long term review and re-use of information content independently of the software used for its creation or updating;
- To massively reduce the burden of maintaining an up-to-date product structure model as the design acquires more detail and fidelity, allowing:
- Responsiveness to component re-design;
- Significant reduction in design time;
- Operational across a collaborative network.
- To increase the pace of initiation activities and securing the quality of the outcome of a new product or maintenance plan proposal:
- Tailor-made solutions;
- Rapid scope and partner changes.
- To enable the collaboration between different companies during the design phase:
- Easily access and share system requirements and design constraints;
- Quickly share component design;
- Improve effectiveness of the design verification loop, facilitating analysis techniques and / or multidisciplinary optimisations.
- Complying with partner security rules.
The VEC-Hub Concept Specification
Describes how an orchestrated set of services organised in a VEC-Hub provide shared information to a set of partners working together.
The VEC-Hub Usage Guideline
Guiding the user on how to use the VEC-Hub in the various phases of a collaborative project.
The VEC-Hub Implementation Guideline
Describes the implementation process from first software installation to a point where the end users start using the system.
VEC-Hub Portal Services
Provide the VEC-Hub interface to the users, an integration platform for partner systems and the service request broker. These services include access management, security management and service management.
VEC-Hub Core Services
Provides the means to manage and share information
common to the Virtual Enterprise including product data, organisational data, reference data and processes. These services are the ones that characterise the VEC-Hub since they define the common view on the product, the organisations/ roles, common processes and the classification of product data. This includes the group of standard services published in OASIS to manage PLCS/PLM information based on ISO10303-239.