| "In five years' time," Andy Grove, the chairman of Intel, said in 1999, "All companies will be Internet companies or they won't be companies at all". In the industrial society of the past, the rules of business were simple -consisting of beating the competition into submission, squeezing suppliers, and keeping customers in ignorance of the business process. The business environment was narrow. With the development of technology and the world economy, the business environment has gone through a tremendous change. The capability to rapidly get information and respond to business environment changes has become vital to all enterprises. Enterprises have come to depend heavily not only on the immediately surrounding business environment but also more and more on the entire world as both a global business environment and a global market. Complex integrated value chains have appeared and made obsolete the old giant firms. Suppliers and customers want to see the whole business picture clearly and have a voice in decision-making. On the other hand, the dominant pattern of business operations in the new century will be based on Virtual Organization (VO) structures. The new globalization environment coupled with the customer-oriented manufacturing approach is not suitable either to big enterprises ?because they cannot adjust or adapt quickly to anticipate market changes ?or to small and medium-sized enterprises because of limited resources. Virtual Enterprises (VE) can save the one and the other and provide them with fast, low cost and high quality manufacturing solutions, hi developing countries, the currently widely applied re-engineering by downsizing proposed by the financial institutions of Breton Wood leads to disastrous social crises and economic asthenia of big and medium-sized local companies. Therefore, Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) has become a main development issue, especially in Africa where the lean theory is no longer workable in the new social and political environment.In order to make contribution to the solving of the above-mentioned problems, a Virtual Organization structure, based on the integration capabilities of Internet has been modeled in our laboratory. The objective of our research is to improve the market capability of small and medium sized companies of the fluid power industry in the new globalization environment lchapters ' & n\ Information management is the core tool of such a structure and no efficient information system can stand without an efficient Information Retrieval subsystem. Therefore, to prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model, we implemented a test-bed web site, the China Hydraulics, Pneumatics and Seals Industry Information Network English Version (ChinaHPS)*[chapter"'(3-I)]. The ChinaHPS project is intended to gather small and medium-sized fluid power enterprises in a virtual organization capable of facing the competition and challenges of the new global business environment. The project is an initiative of the State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. The interest shown by the target companies to the project has proven that the Industry-Oriented Enterprise Virtual alliance meets a need and is a viable and operative solution to the competitiveness of small and medium sized companies. A new Intelligent Information Retrieval system [chapter "' (3 2)' based on the delegated computation theories, agent-based programming paradigm andfuzzy logic is embedded in the ChinaHPS site. The innovation of this IIR system is mainly in its adaptive approach [chapter v (S 8)1. The human user is viewed as a special agent that does not commit to the common ontology of the system. To solve his interaction problem with the other agents, natural language processing algorithms and reinforcement-based learning strategies (leading to an artificial life approach) have been developed to train the software agents to adapt themselves to the profile of the human agent. The natural language processing fchapt...
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