Abstract
Selecting the best desirable Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) system has been a critical problem for organizations for a long time, as the failure on the selection process may have a highly negative impact in terms of costs and market share of a company. It is one of the most important decision making issues covering both qualitative and quantitative factors for organization. Multiple-criteria decision-making has been proved to be a useful approach to analyze these conflicting qualitative and quantitative factors. Literature offers proposals and approaches to handle this kind of problem; Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been applied successfully in most cases of software packages selection problems. This paper proposes an AHP model for the selection of an ERP system. The model's set of criteria was extracted from the literature review and validated by Portuguese organizations. This model can be applied in the ERP system selection using a software application that is under development. This software application eases the application of the AHP process to the selection of ERP packages and will provide input from real-world cases that will allow updating and refining the model.

Abstract
Effective and efficient implementation of intelligent and/or recently emerged networked manufacturing systems require an enterprise level integration. The networked manufacturing offers several advantages in the current competitive atmosphere by way to reduce, by shortening manufacturing cycle time and maintaining the production flexibility thereby achieving several feasible process plans. The first step in this direction is to integrate manufacturing functions such as process planning and scheduling for multi jobs in a network based manufacturing system. It is difficult to determine a proper plan that meets conflicting objectives simultaneously. This paper describes a mobile-agent based negotiation approach to integrate manufacturing functions in a distributed manner; and its fundamental framework and functions are presented. Moreover, ontology has been constructed by using the Protege software which possesses the flexibility to convert knowledge into Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema of Web Ontology Language (OWL) documents. The generated XML schemas have been used to transfer information throughout the manufacturing network for the intelligent interoperable integration of product data models and manufacturing resources. To validate the feasibility of the proposed approach, an illustrative example along with varied production environments that includes production demand fluctuations is presented and compared the proposed approach performance and its effectiveness with evolutionary algorithm based Hybrid Dynamic-DNA (HD-DNA) algorithm. The results show that the proposed scheme is very effective and reasonably acceptable for integration of manufacturing functions.

Abstract
In the context of a distributed/agile/virtual enterprise (D/A/VE) and due to the large number of potential candidate resources, it is important to make a selection of those that will give more guarantees in terms of success of this cooperation and bring better performance to D/A/VE. There are several projects of D/A/VE with different approaches to the selection process. Considering the functionalities of the resources selection model of our project, the main objective of this paper is to present the development of a prototype/demonstrator tool to support it. As result a tool, named SelecE A/VV0, was developed and providing following features: pre-selection ofresources with and without integration of the value analysis (VA), and final selection of resources. This tool supports the development of BMVEARM selection model and permits the validation of the importance of VA integration in the final performance of the resources system selected. Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Abstract
For the project of an Agile/Virtual Enterprise (A/V E) the resources selection is a key factor. The resources systems (output of the selection process) should be prepared to guarantee quality, efficiency and cost-attractiveness, in order to ensure the agility and integrability of the A/V E. This is a difficult matter because it can be a combinatorial and multi-criteria problem. Despite the potential of Value Analysis (VA), none of the resources selection models found in the literature incorporates the evaluation of the resources value. They approach mainly the factors cost and/or time. So, our model constitutes an innovative approach because it gives the highest importance to the value of the resources systems, through the incorporation of VA. The main objective is to quantify the selection process performance with VA integrated into the pre-selection of resources in accordance with the developed model. The paper contribution is the positive confirmation, through the simulation results analysis, of the benefits of VA integration in the resources selection process: greater applicability domain for candidate resources and number of tasks; and reduction of the selection time. In conclusion, the increased efficiency and the superior applicability domain of the model are demonstrated.

Abstract

Abstract
To summarise this editorial, we attempted to briefly chart out some developments in related areas of governance and sustainability. As this field is a 'never ending story', novel questions and problems stem requiring equally novel solutions. At the end, the guest editors hope, and would like, that this special issue will beuseful, meeting the expectations of the authors and wider readership and serving for enhancing the individual and collective learning, theoretical insight and practical applications, and to incentive further scientific development and creation of new papers.