Designing of Virtual Factory Information System by Enterprise Portal

Virtual Enterprise is a new business collaboration form, which used to fulfill unique business requirements and make sure small and medium size enterprises can adapt themselves to modern business environment under increasing pressure. In this situation, collaborative enterprises demand an advanced information management system to share valuable knowledge and expertise. Enterprise Portal is an enterprise-wide application which has been considered as an opportunity to develop and maintain integrated environments for collaborative business. The benefits of Enterprise Portal make it as a new way to approach Virtual Enterprise. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new form of factories collaboration, namely Virtual Factory and elaborate how Enterprise Portal provides integrated services to distributed factories. Therefore, an open source Enterprise Portal Liferay is selected. It enables different factories meet their manufacturing targets. It provides a single tool for all factories to access the real time manufacturing information and products information. In this paper, an innovative method is presented to improve manufacturing process and increase the ability of information sharing across different factories.