Project E4
"Extended Enterprise Management in Enlarged Europe”

The E4 project's major aim is to specifically support Eastern Europe enterprises to take active part and jointly develop collaboration initiatives with long-tradition Western EU R&D and Innovation Centres for intelligent and extended products development in several sectors of the EU manufacturing industry.

The objective of the E4 Project is the development of an innovative integrated, easy to understand, user friendly and low cost platform specifically tailored to the needs of the suppliers operating in a design network, which involves companies from all over Europe . Such a platform will have the following capabilities:

• Project Management,
• Project Monitoring and Control,
• Project Traceability and Quality Control,
• Product Structure Management,
• Knowledge Management in just one platform
• Connectivity to local OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) systems.

The main innovations claimed by E4 concern:

• The platform concept and the underlying business model
• The technologies which will be harnessed to achieve the necessary adaptability, modularity and connectivity: Web services and ontology.

Suppliers of a manufacturing network must “respond to the pressures for continuous innovation and technological adaptation exacerbated by the completion of European internal market and the intensification of competition”. E4 is specifically addressing these needs targeting especially the SMEs which operate in the product development area.

In all domains concerned with assembled products, the design is by now carried out by a network of enterprises which take responsibility of subsystems at the higher tier, and of simpler components at the lower tier. SMEs are most often placed at lower tiers.

Activities at these lower tiers tend to be short – a few months at most – and plagued with frequent design changes originating from the higher levels.

In such a context suppliers compete, as usual, on cost, quality and response time, whereby transparency and reliability are key components of process quality.

The actual situation is that suppliers and SMEs rely upon a great variety of tools, which are not integrated, difficult to use and often ineffective. High costs are sustained to train the people and acquire tools of different make as required by the OEMs.

The ambition of E4 is to be the catalyst of current and past R&D multi-disciplinary efforts (organisational, managerial, psychological, socio-economical, technical) to finally apply c-business and extended product paradigms to enlarged EU SMEs, irrespective of the sector they belong to and of their geographical location. The method followed will be a holistic multi-dimensional collaborative approach which is able to encompass all stages of collaboration from cradle-to-grave (initiation, management, operational life and dissolution), all phases of extended products’ development (conception, design, prototyping), all forms of collaboration (ad-hoc, mediated and planned) and all enterprise assets in any type of business network (people, ICT-systems, processes and knowledge assets).

This holistic paradigm requires a multi-disciplinary and multi-sector perspective, in which human skills and competencies, heterogeneous knowledge assets, independent business models and proprietary ICT systems have to become cooperative & concurrent working teams, shared & accessible resources, synchronised & interconnected processes, inter-operable & open enterprise applications.

To obtain all this E4 aims at developing and engineering a platform to support project and process management which integrate the tools and functions required by the networks they belong to in a cost-effective way. It will moreover support a seamless data exchange with the different levels: design constraints, partial BOMs (Bill of Materials) from above; partial drawings, BOMs and project KPI (Key Performance Indicators) from below. The project will rely upon ASP concepts to provide the required resources – tools or services in a Web based mode to be paid on a use basis – and will define or complete appropriate ontology.

Process control and quality will be achieved thanks to a unique project management approach based on a library of micro-processes which drive the steps, specify the required resources – data and a variety of tools (Computer Aided Design, Computer Aided Engineering, cost, risk, etc.) and feed into a Product and Collaborative Knowledge Management which will cater for tracing and learning. The progress will be objectively measured using KPIs evaluated by a wizard.

We invite all Ukrainian SMEs, as well as SMEs from CEE, who would like to use the above presented platform, give us your needs for this platform architecture, improve and develop the co-operation with the European organizations to contact with us.