The physical operation of a virtual business
In the next step, it should really start from the perspective of customer value, according to the explicit or implicit needs of customers, to define the specific characteristics of products or services, and should take the needs of customers, especially how to help customers achieve value-added (Enriching the Customer) as the most important goal of the enterprise. The question to be studied here is: how to define the product or service provided to the customer can bring more value to the customer. For example, the transition from simply providing "products" to "solutions" is an important way to increase customer value. The traditional way of production and operation is often to sell products to a large number of customers. In fact, the use or value of the same product for different users may be different. The ultimate purpose of a customer buying a product is to solve the real problem they are facing, that is, to get a "solution" to their actual problem. Therefore, the value of the product to the customer is implicit in the "solution" that the customer needs to buy the product. Therefore, if a company wants to help its customers achieve value-added, it must not only provide customers with a product, but more importantly, provide customers with solutions to the real problems they face behind the purchase of that product. The solution should be an organic combination of products, information and services.
After defining a product or service that can help customers achieve value-added, the enterprise also needs to determine the corresponding form of competition, so that the product or service can truly win in the market operation. What needs to be studied here is how companies choose the form of competition. According to Porter's (1987) theory, the basic forms of competitive advantage include cost leadership strategy, differentiation strategy and target concentration strategy. It is important to determine the form of competition, as it will affect the decision of the enterprise whether to form an alliance, how to cooperate with the alliance, and the choice of partners. For example, when enterprises choose the form of competition of cost leadership strategy, enterprises will often form alliances with enterprises with similar resources to form economies of scale.
Once the product or service has been defined and the corresponding forms of competition have been determined, it is now the job of the company to plan for the resources and capabilities needed to accomplish those goals. These resources and capabilities include: (1) equipment and plant resources: including design, manufacturing and processing, assembly, testing and transportation; (2) product brand; (3) information resources; (4) sales channels; (5) management ability; (6) Human resources. The question here is how companies plan and develop specific resource and capability demand tables.
Once a company has developed a table of resource and capacity requirements, it needs to compare it with what it has. When a company lacks the resources and capabilities to do something, it's up to you to decide whether to create it yourself or rely on an external source. When making decisions, enterprises must comprehensively consider various factors, including the type of new product or service innovation, the market's time, cost and quality requirements for new products or services, the maturity of cooperation between enterprises (such as coordination and integration capabilities), and the risk of enterprises losing core competencies in cooperative alliances.
From a technical point of view, Li Yu et al. (2000) used the multiagent system to construct a model of virtual enterprise partner selection. In this multi-agent system, there are virtual business coordinators and individual business agents. The formation process of virtual enterprises is realized through constraint optimization and protocol under decentralized conditions. The selection of a virtual enterprise partner is a process of obtaining information on the capabilities of a single enterprise for a pre-defined goal, which involves analyzing, evaluating and coordinating the capabilities provided by the enterprise, and finally selecting a group of enterprises whose capabilities can meet the objectives of the virtual enterprise. When setting up a virtual enterprise, a professional virtual enterprise coordinator is needed to manage the whole process of partner selection. When the objectives are clear, the coordinator should break down the overall objectives into sub-objectives so that each enterprise can take on some of the work assigned by the virtual enterprise separately. The existing individual enterprises are given the capacity needs from the coordinator or professional information service provider in relation to each of the sub-objectives. If the business is interested in a sub-goal and is able to accomplish it, it sends a capability message to the coordinator to compete for the sub-goal. The facilitator needs to analyze and evaluate the information obtained about the company's capabilities and respond with the following questions:
(1) Can the competitiveness of the enterprise provided fully meet the needs of the sub-objectives?
(2) If there are several companies competing for a sub-goal, which one is the best choice as a virtual enterprise partner? Why?
(3) If the sub-goal cannot be achieved by the existing enterprise, is there a solution?
In 2021, Horizon proposed to build an open-source real-time operating system-Together OS. As you can see from the name, Horizon advocates the idea that the operating system should be open, open source, and everyone participates. At the same time, Horizon also believes that the operating system should not make money, it should be used as a public technical resource, and everyone should work together to promote and build an operating system ecology. With chip + algorithm + tool chain + development platform as the core, we support partners to develop intelligent driving solutions, which is Horizon's current business model. The Horizon Plan will be open to the end and support car companies to independently develop autonomous driving chips. This means that Horizon is going to come up with its core BPU technology architecture to support it, which is a bit like the ARM model. In the same way, ARM is a company worth learning from, which has advanced the global industrial innovation and progress in the era of the Internet of Things and the era of smartphones.
In the network, companies are always geographically dispersed, and they are able to meet each other and cooperate to form a virtual enterprise that can accomplish a common business goal. Proxy technology is a suitable paradigm for integrating individual businesses that participate in virtual enterprises.