Abstract
Operating as a corporate information system, intranets can give employees point-and-click access to a comprehensive range of resources. Moreover, they can facilitate the communication between different business processes in the company, such as marketing and sales, engineering, manufacturing and distribution. On the other hand, by adopting the proper security measures, controlled access to sensitive information can be given to partners, suppliers and customers, giving feasibility to an electronic data interchange (EDI) scenario using the internet as its communication infrastructure. Here we present an overview of the potential security problems faced by any industrial enterprise trying to become a "global enterprise", as well as the technologies behind the presently available solutions.

Abstract
The need of a functional integration in the manufacturing area (Production, Quality, Maintenance), outlooking for a new manufacturing agility, causes the emergence of concerns with reliability, maintenance and security of the manufacturing equipments at the shop-floor. Several models and methodologies, encompassing technical, human, social and organisational aspects such as Total Preventive Maintenance (TPM) or Continuous Improvement (Kaizen), are today available to help in implementing new paradigms in this area. In this paper, we briefly relate our experiences in the development of a maintenance management information system in a shoes manufacturing company, highlighting the socio-organisational context influence on this development. This project was part of the ESPRIT project Real-I-CIM, aimed at providing low cost shop floor advanced management tools, inside an open and distributed architecture.

Abstract
This paper describes results of work developed at INESC within the scope of the Esprit-5478 Shop-Control Project, as well as other related developments. The objective of the Shop-Control project1 has been to help SME's in reducing their operating expenses and enable them to deliver high quality products on schedule by providing them with an integrated shop floor control system. This system is built on an integrated set of shop floor application software packages interacting with the actual shop floor environment through factory data collection equipment and shop floor communication networks. The developed application packages include shop floor scheduling and dispatching, shop floor monitoring, supervision and alarm management, quality assurance and maintenance management. In this paper, the relevance of on-line shop floor data collection is put into focus and the underlying infrastructure is described. Information flow between interacting software applications is also presented, with a special emphasis for shop floor Supervision facilities. The integrated view on the shop floor which is achieved is of utmost importance in the support of shop floor management decision making in a wide range of end-user industries.

Abstract
In the scope of virtual and networked enterprises, we propose a way to integrate quality management into enterprise modeling and allow for quality certification of the whole enterprise. ISO 9001:2000 is presented as a suitable standard for these enterprises quality management systems implementation. On the other hand, quality management system certification in the scope of ISO 10011 is quite difficult, being presented some alternative scenarios for certification.

Abstract
This paper describes the components and functionalities of a Modelling Workbench (MW) to be used within the context of the so-called Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA) methodology. The different life-cycle phases of an enterprise integration project and the model building blocks provided are presented and described. A short description of the proposed prestandard ENV 40 003 basic reference model, which provides the context for the so-called executable models, is first presented. This is followed by an explanation of the use of the MW within the context of the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture life-cycle support. While most of the issues discussed in this paper are confined to the shop floor environment and related applications, the general underlying concepts are relevant to manufacturing systems in general.

Abstract
In the global market, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face increasing competition from large corporations for the control of the more profitable business areas. These corporations compensate for their lower agility and flexibility with easier access to information, resources and economies of scale. The virtual enterprise model of a business organization is thus often seen as one of the best strategic moves for SMEs to achieve a global reach without compromising their independence. This emerging business paradigm certainly brings new challenges to many areas of the enterprise, one of which is the quality assurance of external processes and contracted products and services. This paper introduces and discusses the issue of quality assurance within the scope of virtual and networked enterprises, and presents a novel methodology for the integration of quality management into enterprise modelling and for quality certification of the virtual enterprise. This is especially important because quality certification is becoming mandatory in nearly all markets and the well-established certification methods do not cover all the aspects of the virtual enterprise. ISO 9001:2000, the most widely used quality management system standard in the world, is presented as an interesting starting point for virtual enterprise quality management system implementation and certification. Further requirements include broadening the scope of the quality management system to include the whole enterprise life cycle, i.e. from its creation to decommission. Current auditing procedures will have to be adapted to this new business environment and, to meet such a requirement, a continuous real-time third-party auditing mechanism-fully integrated into the virtual enterprise--model is proposed. A pilot/simulator, implemented in a small virtual enterprise, in the occupational safety and health-care business, is used to illustrate the new environment as well as the novel requirements that quality systems will have to meet in the future.