Visualization functionality of virtual factories an enhancement to collaborative business process management

This paper focuses on process visualization that is applicable to managing a Virtual Factory (VF) business environment. It briefly provides all aspects of implementing the dashboard user interface that is to be used by the VF partners. The dashboard features state-of-The art business intelligence and provides data visualization, user interfaces and menus to support VF partners to execute collaborative processes. With advanced visualizations that produce quality graphics it offers a variety of information visualizations that brings the process data to life with clarity. This data visualization provides critical operational matrices (e.g. KPIs) required to manage virtual factories. Various technical aspects of this dashboard user interface portal are elaborated within the scope of this research such as installation instructions, technical requirements for the users and developers, execution and usage aspects, limitations and future works. The dashboard user interface portal presents different widgets according to the VF requirements that are to be needed to support the visualization and monitoring of various business processes within a VF. The research work highlighted in this paper is conceptualized, developed and validated within the scope of the European Commission NMP priority of the Seventh RTD Framework Programme for the ADVENTURE (ADaptive Virtual ENterprise ManufacTURing Environment) project.