Virtual procurement system for virtual enterprises

This thesis describes the development of a Virtual Procurement System (VPS) that forms an integral technology in the life of a virtual enterprise (VE). The VE represent an organisational response to the density of modern communications. The key concept is that these communications allow a number of different specialist organisations to come together to perform a particular piece of work or project. When the project is complete, the virtual enterprise breaks up and ceases to exist. This work argues that this is exactly how the construction industry operates. The construction industry can be considered as a virtual enterprise by considering the geographical and functional fragmentations of the VE and demonstrating how these can be applied within the construction industry.

While current approaches to data exchanges have greatly relieved problems caused by the geographical fragmentation, they do little or nothing to solve problems caused by functional fragmentation. A new technology is put forward to solve the data fragmentation that is caused by geographical and functional fragmentation. The key is to utilise a tool that is flexible enough to allow data exchanges to take place immediately and to have a neutral data format, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) can be used to build such a neutral format and this technological development has facilitated the development of the VPS.

A central idea underlying the development of the VPS was that the current industry standards for data exchange are insufficiently flexible to meet the needs of new organisational structures in general, and virtual enterprises (VEs) in particular. The alternative proposal here is that small-scale, flexible and locally agreed standards can be used to facilitate the diversity of modern business exchanges.