Collaborative processes within virtual manufacturing business networks: How SMEs can be benefited?

Business collaboration in the form of virtual factory is nowadays considering as one of the critical factor in the manufacturing community, especially within small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). In such an environment, it is very important to deal with accompanying process details within virtual factory environment. This research articulates fundamental concepts of the virtual business network in the form of plug-and-play virtual factory, where both intra and inter-organizational processes are defined for the purpose to execute virtual collaboration. Different phases of virtual factory and its associated process steps are defined with necessary annotations. All such business processes as required to execute the virtual factory are exclusively successfully. Specific example of the virtual factory's monitoring process is illustrated and highlighted with the help of user interface portal known as 'Dashboard'. The functionality and importance of this dashboard user interface layer is presented with its inherent features and implementation perspectives. This paper is concluded with future research directions.