Constructing Service Oriented Dynamic Virtual Enterprises in Chinese Apparel Industry

Service oriented computing technologies facilitate design and implementation of virtual enterprises. By keeping the systems of business partners as autonomous and lose coupled service components, the service oriented paradigm supports flexible integration of heterogeneous systems or components within virtual enterprises. Taking a real world project in Chinese apparel industry as an example, this paper firstly analyzed the challenges in virtual enterprise construction. Then it presented a service oriented framework that supports IT-enabled heterogeneous resource sharing and dynamic virtual enterprise construction. According to the deployments in apparel companies in China, we conclude that the framework presented in this paper facilitates the construction of dynamic virtual enterprises with process services, participant management and message based inter-organizational process collaborations.