Management and improvement of the extended enterprise

Customer expectations and continually increasing competition on a world-wide scale are forcing industry to rethink business strategies, alliances, partnerships and resulting everyday operation. In parallel, recent developments in IT and communications offer significant opportunities for all market sectors to operate in fundamentally different ways than to-date. The paper discusses these developments which result in the emergence of new concepts in agile manufacturing, such as extended enterprises and the associated impact on structure, management and control of `networked´ manufacturing industry. Practical solutions for some aspects are indicated