Towards flexible inter-enterprise collaboration: A supply chain perspective

Abstract

Since neither uniformity nor pluriformity provide the answer to easing inter-enterprise collaborations, we address (inspired by relevant strengths of service-oriented architectures) the problem of supporting such collaborations from an infrastructure perspective. We propose architectural guidelines for interactively establishing a suitable inter-enterprise collaboration scheme, before the exchange of actual content takes place. The proposed guidelines stem from an analysis of some currently popular approaches concerning the achievement of inter-enterprise collaborations with ICT means. Taking into account the strong relevance of these issues to the Supply chain domain, we put our work in the Supply chain perspective. We also illustrate our architectural guidelines with an example from this domain. It is expected that the research contribution, reported in this paper, will be useful as an additional result concerning the (ICT-driven) inter-enterprise collaboration. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.