Cel
The ambition of E4 STREP is to be the catalyst of current and past RandD 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 and concurrent working teams, shared and accessible resources, synchronised and interconnected processes, inter-operable and 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.