Business process monitoring using web services in B2B e-commerce

Abstract

Organisations are re-engineering their B2B communications to be performed through web services. Their aim is to create modularised services that support the business processes within their organisation and also those external entities that participate in these same business processes. This improvement is at the expense of the organisation's knowledge of its performance, as this knowledge will become buried within the internal processing of the web service platform. This research introduces an approach to reclaim and improve this knowledge for the organisation by establishing a framework that enables the definition of web services, together with the logging and analysis of the enactment of web services. This framework utilises web service concepts, DSS principles, and agent technologies, to enable feedback on the organisation's performance measures through the analysis of the web services. We apply this framework to a specific case study where suppliers participate in an inter-organisational workflow via a Private Exchange in the context of order fulfilment. A key benefit of this work is that the data is stored once but provides information both to the organisation acting as the customer and the organisation acting as the supplier. It therefore removes the need for development of internal performance monitoring tools to monitor web services performance.