MANAGING RISK IN VIRTUAL ENTERPRIES NETWORKS

Pressures imposed by today's modern and highly competitive business environment and momentum created with the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies force business entities to rethink current models, in order to benefit from a more flexible and cost effective form of organizational management. Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles aspires to set a point-of-reference for scholars and researchers in the fields of Virtual Enterprises and Supply Chain Management who are interested in studying the Risk Management dimension in a cross-disciplinary fashion by applying new ideas and synthetic thinking in already well established concepts. Furthermore, this valuable reference aims to attract both graduate and post-graduate students studying the Risk Management discipline.

Stavros Ponis (PhD) has graduated from the School of Mechanical Engineering of the National Technical University Athens (NTUA) in 1996. His Masters thesis resulted in the design of a software module for enhancing the functionality of an expert system that aimed to assist enterprises in the selection of ERP software packages based on the mode of their production systems operation. Dr. Ponis also owns a PhD from NTUA (2003) which focuses on the elaboration of a business reference model to support the production management and logistics processes of Virtual Enterprises in the Apparel Industry. From 2006 to 2008, Dr. Ponis has worked on his post doc research on the fields of Knowledge Management and Logistics to support Virtual Enterprise Networks. In that context he acted as the main post doc researcher for the project ""A Reference Model to Support Knowledge Logistics in a Virtual Enterprise Environment"" funded by the Ministry of National Education and Religious Affairs (http://simor.ntua.gr/pythagoras/index.html).

In the beginning of his career (1996), Dr. Ponis has worked as an IT Manager - for almost three years- on behalf of a leading apparel enterprise. Later on (2000-2001), he was involved in several targeted research projects on behalf of the Section of Industrial Management and Operational Research (SIMOR) of NTUA as a Researcher. On December 2001 he was appointed the position of Teaching and Research Associate in SIMOR. As from November 2005, he has been elected Lecturer in the scientific area of Supply Chain Management and he currently teaches a series of courses such as Supply Chain Management, Operations Research, E-Commerce, Management of Production Information Systems and ERP Systems to graduate and post graduate students of NTUA.

Dr. Stavros Ponis has published more than fifty scientific papers in edited books, scientific journals, conference proceedings and the specialized in production management commercial press. After editing the book entitled ""Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles"", his publication short-term objectives include the authoring of a textbook to support production and logistics decision making with the use of spreadsheets and the editing of an Encyclopedia for Virtual Enterprises and Supply Chain Management. Dr. Ponis has also acted as an associate editor in two scientific journals and is currently a member of the Scientific Committee in several International Conferences.

Dr. Ponis is an Expert Reviewer for two different EU research units, these being INFSO.E2: Technologies for Information Management and D5-ICT for Enterprise Networking. Up to now, and for the last five years, Dr. Ponis has monitored, evaluated and finally approved the works of two large European Projects with a budget sum of over seven million euros. Dr. Ponis also is an expert reviewer for the General Secretariat of Research and Development and the Greek Information Society S.A.

Finally, Dr. Ponis current research interests are resided in the areas of Production Planning and Control, Supply Chain Management, Business Process Modeling, Networked and Virtual Enterprises, and Information Systems that support all the above.