Overview of virtual enterprises in supply chain management

In today´s ever-changing market, technology development, customer demands and global competition, decreases of product life cycles push logistics organizations in a supply chain (SC) to shift to flexible, robust, autonomy, and responsive organization such as a virtual enterprise (VE). Internet and ICT support SMEs collaboration to establish VE with an inter-organizational network, virtual organization and integration based on core capabilities of partners. To survive in the competitive market, these SCs require agility and effectiveness are obtained by forming highly dynamic VEs within supplier networks. Therefore academic and corporate interest in VE in supply chain management (SCM) has increased considerably in recent years. Although vast papers are published on VE, few of them are directly related to VE in SCs. This paper aims to review existing literature and investigates the issues and challenges of VE in SCM. 46 papers are selected and reviewed. They are published between 2007 to June 2012, a period that has seen a significant increase in this field. Particular attention is given to those issues of collaboration and integration, network organization mode, partner selection, security, negotiation and risk management. Also contributions and methodologies used in papers are discussed.