Enterprise Innovation

13Innovation and Production Improvement in Virtual Enterprises: the User Perspective

13.1. Why validation

Pilot application validation is a crucial step for moving toward the validation of the software produced by business innovation in virtual enterprise environment project (BIVEE). Pilot application validation ensures that the BIVEE Environment actually meets the end-user’s needs, and that the platform has been developed according to the user requirements. After the delivery of the first deployable version of the platform, the defined deployment strategy and pilot application validation cases have been executed as much as possible.

The BIVEE Environment is composed of several different components, each addressing different kinds of requirements of the end-user organizations. Software components of the BIVEE Environment expose a seamless integration and interoperability among each other such that the end-users are dealing with a single integrated system. Hence, during the pilot application validation process, end-users use a single platform through unified interfaces.

13.2. End-users

This section provides a description of the AS-IS status of the two enduser organizations in BIVEE, namely AIDIMA and Loccioni. The AS-IS status presents the innovation and production operations of both end-users before the introduction of the BIVEE Environment. The activities that were carried out inside the organizations concerning innovation management, production management and information ...