Research Of Virtual Enterprise Partner Selection

With the development of information technology and the competition between the markets, more and more enterprises start to give their attention to enterprises' exterior. Virtual Enterprise (VE) becomes the practical choose of many enterprises. It becomes the valid means of advancing market competition capability to build VE. How to assemble the appropriate copartners to organize VE in the shortest time, with the least cost and venture becomes an important problem must be resolved. So the selection of proper partners is critical to create VE.These selection models and methods of partners in VE are systematically studied in the paper on the base of basic characteristic application. Reviewing recent literature on partnership and part-selection, several issues needed for further research are indicated. The basic characteristics of virtual enterprise, including its basic characters, basic types and the significance of the establishment of virtual enterprise are analyzed in detail. Then the general principles, influential factors and select steps of the partner selection are expounded. And the two basic ways of the common choice of partners:the invitation- and public- are analyzed. in accordance with virtual enterprise partners'characteristics, a new selection of partners of the three-stage is presented, including preparatory stage, the filtering stage and comprehensive evaluation stage. The author elaborates thoroughly the methods of selection from qualitative and quantitative angle. In the preparatory stage, leading into the concept of the virtual broker, the latent cooperation colleagues are searched for the core business enterprise quickly in the huge business enterprise database. Then the latent partners are filtered by relation theories in the next phase. In the third stage, according to the virtual enterprise's management and process characteristics, for the study of virtual enterprise manufacturing partner selection, results from the type of Effectiveness, Ability, Relation and Restraint index, the candidate partners' comprehensive evaluation index system is built, and in accordance with the characteristics of different index, the corresponding quantitative calculation methods are given. Then with the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) algorithm and the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) algorithm being integrated, a new method is used on some kinds of partners' evaluation and selection. Finally, a practical case is designed to validate the feasibility and validity of the method.