Uma arquitetura de software para arranjos produtivos locais.

Abstract

A few years ago, the competitiveness of an enterprise was dictated by its capacity to sell more and at lower price. Today it is defined by its capacity to negotiate on a global market, to sell products without geographic limitation. This context promotes the growth of big enterprises and forces small ones to lose market share because they cannot compete against the big brands. To solve this problem, small enterprises are working through networks, interacting with suppliers and customers which are close geographically, and receiving support from local development agencies. This kind of enterprise network is what we call Enterprise Clusters. Until now, IT solutions were not prepared to support this new kind of enterprise organization - where the culture of information sharing and collaboration with competitors to attend big markets prevails. This work proposes a software architecture for enterprise clusters. The architecture aims to attend cluster requirements, supporting a model that reflects technical requirements. A group of enterprises and cluster specialists participated on requirement elicitation and architectural review activities. Architecture evaluation was carried by a scenario based methodology. A prototype was developed.