Today's leading companies are well aware of the importance of an integrated, system-wide perspective in managing and designing the entire extended enterprise. This involves a wide range of activities that have traditionally been considered as separate functional areas, including production planning and scheduling, inventory management, customer demand management, warehousing and distribution, and transportation. These activities may take place within a single factory, between business units of the same company, or between different, often competing, companies. While a billion-dollar software sector has emerged to provide information systems infrastructure for such enterprises, most commercial software systems rely on planning, control and coordination technologies developed more than three decades ago. Design and management of the extended enterprise is thus a major growth area for research activity aimed at enhancing management's decision-making abilities and understanding of the complex dynamics of these operations.

The goal of Laboratory for Extended Enterprises at Purdue (LEEAP) is to create a world-class teaching and research environment for the design and management of extended enterprises. Our specific focus is on the development a theory-based understanding of the behavior of the complex supply chains found in today's extended enterprises and the use of these results to develop software tools to enhance management decision-making.

Current research efforts include:

• Supply chain partnerships
• Supply contracts
• Information in supply chain management
• Multi-Location inventory management
• Production planning with remanufacturing
  

The Laboratory has been funded over the last two years in the excess of $1.5 million, by sponsors including the National Science Foundation, General Motors, UPS, Eli Lilly and Unilever. Details of the various projects underway can be found at (Projects), and is a Component Center of the Purdue E-Enterprise Center at Discovery Park.