e-Hubs -: Collaborative engineering enabled through web broker services

Within the era of growing global competition companies realize that there is enormous potential to leverage knowledge and experience that resides outside their own core business activities, and that this expertise could be very synergistic to theirs if only they could tap into it. The main challenge for any enterprise to become competitive in this new business environment is to develop the right framework for exploiting new global services, information and knowledge networks. The e-Hub concept, an extended broker for engineering services, copes with this challenge in the domain of technical product development, and targets in particular the highly specialized engineering tasks involved with that. The e-Hub concept is based on the premise that this form of a collaborative intermediate will provide a perfect mechanism for cohesion building and the marketing of SME expertise. This paper presents the frame of reference for the e-Hub design, development and implementation. Following the general architecture of collaborations the constituent elements of the e-Hub reference model are deduced and specified. As a conclusion the e-Hub represents a novel approach to effective distributed e-Engineering and delivers the right business mechanism to achieve this within the technological, organizational and human constraints that are present.