In the global market, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face increasing competition from large corporations for the control of the more profitable business areas. These corporations compensate for their lower agility and flexibility with easier access to information, resources and economies of scale. The virtual enterprise model of a business organization is thus often seen as one of the best strategic moves for SMEs to achieve a global reach without compromising their independence. This emerging business paradigm certainly brings new challenges to many areas of the enterprise, one of which is the quality assurance of external processes and contracted products and services. This paper introduces and discusses the issue of quality assurance within the scope of virtual and networked enterprises, and presents a novel methodology for the integration of quality management into enterprise modelling and for quality certification of the virtual enterprise. This is especially important because quality certification is becoming mandatory in nearly all markets and the well-established certification methods do not cover all the aspects of the virtual enterprise. ISO 9001:2000, the most widely used quality management system standard in the world, is presented as an interesting starting point for virtual enterprise quality management system implementation and certification. Further requirements include broadening the scope of the quality management system to include the whole enterprise life cycle, i.e. from its creation to decommission. Current auditing procedures will have to be adapted to this new business environment and, to meet such a requirement, a continuous real-time third-party auditing mechanism-fully integrated into the virtual enterprise-model is proposed. A pilot/simulator, implemented in a small virtual enterprise, in the occupational safety and health-care business, is used to illustrate the new environment as well as the novel requirements that quality systems will have to meet in the future.
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机译：在全球市场上，中小型企业（SME）面临着来自大公司的日益激烈的竞争，以控制更有利可图的业务领域。这些公司通过更容易获得信息，资源和规模经济来弥补其较低的敏捷性和灵活性。因此，通常将业务组织的虚拟企业模型视为中小型企业在不损害其独立性的情况下实现全球影响力的最佳战略举措之一。这种新兴的业务范例无疑给企业的许多领域带来了新的挑战，其中之一就是对外部流程以及合同产品和服务的质量保证。本文介绍并讨论了虚拟企业和网络企业范围内的质量保证问题，并提出了一种将质量管理集成到企业建模和虚拟企业质量认证中的新颖方法。这一点特别重要，因为质量认证在几乎所有市场上都已成为强制性的，而行之有效的认证方法并不涵盖虚拟企业的所有方面。 ISO 9001：2000是世界上使用最广泛的质量管理体系标准，被提出作为虚拟企业质量管理体系实施和认证的有趣起点。进一步的要求包括扩大质量管理体系的范围，使其涵盖整个企业生命周期，即从创建到退役的整个生命周期。当前的审计程序将必须适应这种新的业务环境，并且为了满足这种要求，提出了一种完全集成到虚拟企业模型中的连续实时第三方审计机制。在职业安全和保健业务的小型虚拟企业中实施的飞行员/模拟器用于说明新环境以及质量系统将来必须满足的新要求。
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