title: A Toolkit Development for Green Virtual Enterprise Breeding Environments
Creators: name: Romero Díaz, David
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2017
Subjects: subject: Green virtual enterprise breeding environments

description: Green Virtual Enterprise Breeding Environments (GVBEs) are long-term strategic alliances of green enterprises and their related support institutions aimed at offering the necessary conditions (e.g. human, financial, social, infrastructural and organisational) to threefold support: (a) the evolution of their member enterprises to become Green Enterprises, (b) the rapid and fluid configuration of dynamic Green Virtual Enterprises as forward and reverse supply networks, and (c) the sharing and recycling of resources by means of collaboration mechanisms such as: information, materials, water, energy and/or infrastructure (services) with the intention of achieving sustainable development in a collaborative way. This thesis aims to systematically demonstrate a toolkit development, outlining the necessary ‘ingredients’, or elements, for creating and managing a GVBE, where this GVBE achieves desirable systemic properties defined by a synergy of principles drawn from the Industrial Ecology (IE), Collaborative Networked Organisations (CNOs), Systems Theory (ST), and Enterprise Architecture (EA) disciplines. In doing so, it is hoped that the thesis will achieve the following goals: (A) The pragmatic goal of helping IE protagonists and CNO managers to create feasible GVBEs, and (B) The goal of identifying missing ingredients/elements, those that are necessary but not-yet available. The proposed GVBE toolkit included the following main reference artefacts (or models) – supporting the GVBE lifecycle management:  A GVBE Reference Model characterizing the GVBE unique features and highlighting the synergetic opportunities between collaboration and sustainability practices.  A GVBE Reference (Modelling) Framework with five building blocks: (1) targets, (2) actors, (3) operating principles, (3) lifecycles and (5) technologies (systems and tools) to create and manage GVEs and their breeding environments.  A GVBE Reference Maturity Model with six GVBEs Evolutionary Models (viz. (1) Standard VBE, (2) Eco-labelled GVBE, (3) Environmental GVBE, (4) Eco-Efficient GVBE, (5) Industrial Symbiosis GVBE and (6) Eco-Industrial GVBE) and their Eco-Industrial Networking Strategies in 10 domains (viz. materials; energy; transportation; marketing; human resources; I &amp; C Systems; Environmental, Health and Safety; Production Processes; Quality of Life and Community; and Waste Management).  A GVBE RESOLVE Strategies Reference Model with six circularity strategies: Restore/Regenerate, Sharing, Optimise, Loop, Virtualise, and Exchange.  A GVBE Bag of Assets Reference Model with new suggested Circular and Sharing Economies business opportunities to be explored.  A F-GVE Reference Model (dynamic forward supply network) with sustainable manufacturing, logistics and consumption strategies for offering and delivering green products to the market in a sustainable way.  A R-GVE Reference Model (dynamic reverse supply network) with closed-loop networks strategies for recovering the products sold under the GVBE brand (product stewardship) for direct-use, repair, re-manufacture, recycle or safe disposal.  A GVE Broker Reference Model as a vital actor/role for the identification and/or development of new circular and sharing economies within the GVBE and green (collaboration) business opportunities within the market/society.  A GSVE Reference Model as an advanced GVE model enabled by the next generation technologies corresponding to the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0. Finally, the GVBE toolkit was validated against the Sustainable Engineering principles, Circular Economy principles, Systems of Systems Engineering principles, and the Viable System Model sub-systems functions requirements to guarantee at ‘preliminary design level’ the viability and sustainability of a GVBE and its GVEs.