Virtual Enterprise Partner Selection System

"Virtual enterprise" has been considered as a new business mode for gaining profits in today's highly-dynamic environment. However, nowadays, most of the documents of VE discusses either on building the VE by using the information technology or on some general principles.Especially,as far as the partners' selection is concerned, most study the decision methods only, and has no systematical solutions raised. This paper puts forward a set of solutions for partners' selection and management on the basis of predecessors.This paper gives market opportunity identification, value chain analysis, core capability identification, partners' selection and management for the broker company. Among the solution, the stresses lie in the construction of partner' selection processes and the discuss of some other important items of partners' selection.As for the construction of process, this paper thinks that before building the virtual enterprise, the company must find that there are special needs have not been satisfied up to now in the market. Then,the company analyzes the opportunity, and describes the rough value chain; on the following, judges the core competence. At the same time, the company divides the partners into outsourcing partners and collaboration partners. When the field is key, collaboration partners must be selected, otherwise, the company may use outsourcing. The selection process runs parallelly. Though the methods are the same, they have different stresses. Especially in the selection of collaboration partners, the opportunity must be considered particularly. That is, when should the partner be brought into the alliance? In a word, the partners' selection time must show the characters of economy and agility. During the course,the AHP and utility function are used, the qualitative and quantitative methods are both considered, leading to a more effective result and a more practical selection decision process.As for the other important items of partners' selection, Stresses lie on the establishment of several mechanisms, and they are: bargaining mechanism, benefit distribution, communication and trust mechanism.