Trust building for SMEs through an e-Engineering Hub

Abstract

Trust building is a vital issue and enablerfor e-Business. It has been studied at various stages of e-Business from initial trust establishment, contract negotiation and formation, fulfilment to closure. Current studies mainly focus on building trust through the improvement of the social business environment and online security by adopting latest technologies. This paper introduces a new trust building approach developed in the eHUBs (e-Engineering enabled by Holonomic and Universal Broker Services) project. Unlike most of the current trust building studies, this approach fosters trust building between Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) and their clients through collaborative project planning (PP). The e-Hub provides a transparent, traceable and predictable collaborative PP and contract negotiation platform. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.