PLENT: A European Project on SME co-operation

Abstract

Today enterprises expand their activities and co-operate with each other in order to adapt their production to the fast changing market environment. The different forms of co-operation need new management approaches from the individual enterprises, to co-ordinate the work of the different manufacturing organisations. A new, co-operative manufacturing network model is proposed for co-ordinating the production of SMEs, based on the holonic paradigm. The model has been developed in the frame of an ESPRIT Project by four countries. The paper shortly describes the main modules of the model and introduces an application under realisation in Hungary, in an agricultural SME network.