The actual situation is that partners in virtual organisations rely upon a great variety of tools, which are not integrated, difficult to use and often ineffective. High costs are sustained to train the people and acquire tools of different make as required by the OEMs. The objective of the proposed paper is to present a conceptual model of an integrated engineering environment specifically tailored to the needs of the suppliers operating in a design network. The focal point is to show how monitoring and control of projects in virtual organisations can be supported. Therefore a Quality Control Management (QCM) concept will be presented that is able to provide several services in order to trace and control project processes and performance in an effective, integrated, easy to understand and user-friendly way. The approach presented in the proposed paper is basing on the work carried out by the European funded research project E4 (Extended Enterprise management in