The first step to identify the business processes for manufacturing networks went through a review of existing literature collaborative networks to arrive to a comprehensive list of business processes several fields of research. Some of the fields considered were: Collaborative Networks, Supply Networks, Manufacturing Networks; Supply Chain Management, and Business Processes. Towards this end, several online repositories as Web of Knowledge, Scopus, and Google Scholar search engine were used to obtain articles in scientific peer-review journals in these fields.

The keywords used in the search were “collaborative networks”, “business networks”, “supply chain networks”, “virtual factory”, “virtual collaboration”, “business processes of collaborative networks”, “collaborative frameworks”, “manufacturing business processes”.

 

The following procedure was used to identify and describe the business processes for manufacturing networks:

1. Papers selection, according to the guidelines on the subject, the type of papers (journal, conference) and the reputation (rating).

2. Analysis to the papers selected to collect a set of business processes capable of filling the needs of manufacturing networks. This way it was possible to prepare the table A1 (Annexes) where an extensive set of business processes is presented, organized according to four different phases and sub-phases considered in the project ADVENTURE.

3. Review of each process and fusion of those that somehow had the same purpose synthesizing the initial table in a new table with only 15 business processes that represent the four phases initially defined to represent the entire manufacturing network.

4. Perform a summary of the literature used and the goal was to find the original source of each business process, reaching in some cases the frameworks of existing collaboration as is the case SCOR APQC, CPFR .

5. Process characterization based on the papers.

 

In the case of practices the methodology used was similar to the business processes. A survey to create a list of practices presented in papers was conducted and subsequently practices were selected and assigned to each process according to the context.

 

The business processes and practices for manufacturing networks were validated both with the researchers of project ADVENTURE and with the companies on the Advisory Board of the ADVENTURE project.

To present the work and explain the type of involvement required for the validation of the reference model a presentation integrated into the project ADVENTURE workshop in Porto was done. This presentation presented the work developed and how it was structured, then explained the two phases of validation, through an online application form and a workshop with companies. The online survey gathered feedback on the business processes, while the workshop with companies selected the practices used, e.g. through the presentation of practices it was possible to notice what is actually useful and used by companies. Thus it was possible to validate and adjust processes to the reality of companies and select only the most relevant ones.