Abstract

Distribution has become an increasingly common characteristic for modern service and production companies. Enterprises nowadays rely on distribution of their operations for provision of their supplies, labor, and for selling their products in dynamic global markets. Much of today enterprises efforts to cope with global markets are being directed towards the finding of effective collaboration means among their operations and partners. This research proposes a model for assisting distributed enterprises in modeling their operations by optimizing and integrating their workflow to accomplish the collaborative objective. The method developed, called the distributed parallel integration evaluation model (DPIEM) models the workflow in the distributed enterprise based on three integration scenarios. DPIEM minimizes the integrated tasks total cost by adding as many parallel servers per task as possible. The method was tested for a case of distributed assembly of two part-types. A total of eight scenarios for the case were analyzed, yielding the recommended number of parallel servers per integrated task. For comparison, each scenario was also simulated with the TIE parallel-computer environment. The TIE simulation results corroborate the DPIEM recommendation based on the lowest total cost for the case analyzed.