The Trading Group Community System from Enmore Services builds upon the concept of a "trusted supply relationship" with web based technology and communication services to enable customer support, supply chain management and cooperative development for small business communities.

The concept of the virtual company or virtual corporation gained currency in the early 1980s, but what began as a futuristic vision soon became an economic necessity for most large organisations.

Continuing globalisation has driven the necessity to exploit lower cost economies, which in turn necessitated the development of sophisticated supply chain management, and in due course cooperative development with key suppliers. The evolution of sophisticated supply chain systems and cooperative development techniques fostered the innovative virtual company concept. With these techniques, virtual companies could, in theory, be readily formed that controlled the definition and quality of their product or service, directly managed the demand cycle from their customers through to a well managed supply chain, but outsourced all other activities.

The success of this concept has however been patchy in the large company world and this is now thought to be because big company supply chain relationships are often governed by short-term profit-centred approaches. For the virtual company concept to be really successful it is now realised that a high degree of trust must exist between the primary 'customer facing' company and its supplying entities.

In the small business sector however supply relationships are governed much more by personnel relationships - in other words business is normally only conducted between small companies where a high degree of trust has already been established, and this essential difference means that the small business sector is extremely well placed to exploit the powerful virtual company concept.

These low cost, community oriented, packaged services are being developed by Enmore Services under the umbrella of partners-in-supply, a specialised line of business focused upon support and collaboration services for small business communities.