Communication as a key factor in Virtual Enterprise paradigm support

This paper deals with description of a communication environment to support virtual enterprises or cooperation between large number of small and medium enterprises (SME's). This paper builds oil rand further develops authors paper Communication environment for small and medium enterprises by Januska, M.; Kurkin, O.; Miller, A. [1] Virtual enterprise paradigm deals with number of problems during its implementation. Two main problems are lack of mutual confidence between potential partners and no universal communication environment for mutual information exchange. Business subjects interested in common project and their ability to communicate with each other effectively, is a critical factor for success of the project. Communication between these entities is a source of information and data, which all participants need for being able to work effectively. Therefore the communication is strongly correlated to the performance. Nowadays there is a significantly increasing pressure on the speed of communication, transparency, relevance and volume of data transmitted. This need leads to design of a new communication environment. There is none or minimal possibility to unificate the information and communication technologies in short term inter-firm cooperation. Unification of ICT in long time cooperation is also questionable with regards to the price-performance ratio. This means that quick start of cooperation is threatened by the absence of an effective way of information and data exchange. Therefore the appropriate and affordable communication tool to support creation and function of virtual enterprises is required. Tool, designed by author in his dissertation thesis, is optimized exactly to support the virtual enterprise paradigm. Goal of authors work is to make effective and transparent communication within virtual enterprise. It should be done by addressing communication as a key factor for cooperation success to increase competitiveness of virtual enterprises.