Platform Design for the B2(B2B) Approach

Abstract

Business-to-business or “B2B” is a term commonly used to describe the transaction of goods or services between businesses, enabled through a platform that allows for the interaction between customers and suppliers. Today, the new challenge is the integration of financial and logistics services into the business relationship without having to install thousands of peer-to-peer interfaces. The authors follow an approach that introduces a new level of business, that has been called B2(B2B). The purpose of this paper is to describe briefly the design of the FLUID-WIN project that targets this new approach, and to sketch the components to be developed in order to integrate the activities between significantly different business entities.