Collaborative BP engineering in alliances of SMEs

Abstract

To fit economic constraints, enterprises are more and more focused on their own business. This trend involves renewing enterprise organisation to integrate inter-enterprise partnership. These virtual (or extended or networked) enterprise organisations require modelling techniques able to take into account inter-enterprise co-operation, flexible and lean enough to be used on "short term" projects. This can lead towards adapting management modes, previously dedicated to production activities, in order to include engineering activities. For this purpose, we proposed a modelling framework integrating both static and dynamic points of view on the alliance organisation. This dual approach call be used to control the way the alliances evolve or to guide the way common business processes are engineered. In this paper, we focus on the collaborative business process design. For this purpose, we propose a multi-level description: first, management rules are taken into account to select "conceptual" models, then, the alliance collaboration strategy, contractually formalised, is used to turn this conceptual description into an organisational one from which operational models call be set. By this way, "the alliance structure" and "evolution scenarii" defined previously can be combined to define how business processes can be modelled. © 2004 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.