• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.21-37
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• 1997

As the complexity in design and manufacturing activities of distributed virtual enterprises rapidly increases, the issue of process management becomes more critical to shorten the time-to-market, reduce the manufacturing cost and improve the product quality. This paper proposes a unified framework to manage design and manufacturing processes in a distributed environment. We present a methodology which utilizes process flow graphs to depict the hierarchical structure of workflows and process grammars to represent various design processes and design tools. To implement the proposed concept, we develop a process management system which mainly consists of a cockpit and manager programs, and we finally address a preliminary implementation procedure based on the Object Modeling Technique. Since the proposed framework can be a formal approach to the process management by providing formalism, parallelism, reusability, and flexibility, it can be effectively applied to further application domains of distributed virtual enterprises.