Integrated solution to support enterprise interoperability at the business process level on e-Procurement

Abstract

Major trend in the global market is the increasing collaboration among enterprises during the entire product life-cycle, motivated by business drivers like cost reduction, efficiency, flexibility and the focus on core competencies. New solutions in e-Procurement of raw and semi-finished materials are likely to be developed in the coming years, as stakeholders realize the significant benefits of a seamless collaboration supported on interoperable ICT systems. The concept of business processes has received by the organizations an increasing acceptance, integrating disjoint business-oriented activities within an enterprise. Such concept could be extended to the collaborative context, by means of Cross-Organisational Business Processes (CBPs), thus addressing interenterprise interoperability at an extended business process level. The work presented in this paper proposes an innovative integrated solution which enables design and enactment of CBPs using new tools for modelling, execution, using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) supported by the exchange of messages. The solution has been validated in the furniture e-Procurement domain. This work has been performed within the scope of the European IST-507849 ATHENA Integrated project.