Virtual Integration

Description:

Virtual Integration involves linking different applications, databases, and locally and globally distributed systems in such a way that they work together seamlessly and are easily accessible from a user's perspective. It is the integration through the whole value chain made up of loose affiliations of companies, organised as a network, where physical assets are replaced by information.

Enablers:

• ever more demanding customer requirements: not only concerned with reduced costs and shorter lead times, but also increasingly focused on requirements for product and service offerings tailored to an individual customer’s requirements.
  
• ever increasing competition: not only because of easier market entry, enabling new entrants to steal significant market share at the expense of unresponsive existing suppliers, but also because e-business now gives opportunities for customers and suppliers to bypass traditional supply chain structures.
  
• ever increasing volumes and velocity of information: the requirement to gather, process and act on massively increasing volumes of information in a rapid and intelligent manner.
  
• The Increasing Use of Internet
  
• Network Bandwidth
  

Inhibitors:

• Extending the retirement age to another 10 years so people will have to work more

Paradigms:

Through virtual integration, people/companies are no longer restrained to stay/come to in one physical place to do business: the corporate department can be dispersed anywhere in the world as long as it is best for fulfilling its duties; Institutions from different part of the world(suppliers and customers) work seemlessly as a whole to carry out huge tasks too large, too complicated for the capability of either side; Information scattered around the world is readily available in diversed viewpoints for different users of the integrated system.

Experts:

Dell

Web Resources:

http://www.paconsulting.com/news/by_pa/2000/by_pa_20000321.htm