Abstract
In order to create innovative business products, share knowledge between people and businesses, or increase the control and quality of services, more and more often enterprise business processes involve in collaborations by delegating or providing some pieces of work to other enterprises. Necessity to cooperate in the cross-enterprise setting leads to Collaborative Business Processes (CBPs). The difference between CBPs and Business Processes (BPs) is in the decentralized coordination, flexible backward recovery, participants notification about the state, efficient adaptability to changes, presence of multiple information systems, and individual authorization settings. In the paper we consider a specific case of CBPs where multiple collaborating partners use Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system of the same vendor. The vendor can see (e.g., monitor) the changes of data elements, but does not have explicit process awareness in the ERP system to support flow of activities in the cross-enterprise setting. The paper also discusses different settings of cross-enterprise CBP and shows simplified enterprise models behind the vendor possibilities to positively impact collaborative processes. The restrictions of the vendor are implicit information flows in BP, diversity of ERP integrations with third party Information Systems (IS), the lack of mechanisms for monitoring BP instances, backward recovery, user notification about the current state and tasks, and inability to make explicit changes in customers’ ISs.
Highlights
In order to create innovative business products, share knowledge between people and businesses, or increase the control and quality of services, enterprises need to collaborate with each other, delegating or providing some pieces of work to other enterprises [1]
We focus on cases where several collaborating enterprises use the same Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system
The review of the available Collaborative Business Processes (CBPs) solutions revealed that each paradigm has its own challenges
Summary
In order to create innovative business products, share knowledge between people and businesses, or increase the control and quality of services, enterprises need to collaborate with each other, delegating or providing some pieces of work to other enterprises [1]. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems support cross-enterprise CBPs [13] It might have specific restrictions (discussed further) that make it hard to control and monitor such processes, e.g., private/public and explicit/implicit information flows, diversity of ERP integrations with customers’ information systems (IS), a lack of mechanisms for collaborative process monitoring and backward recovery, and inability to make changes in customers’ ISs. In this paper we provide extended information from the [39] and focus on the following research question: “Can ERP system vendor support collaborative cross-enterprise processes for its customers?” Such question arises because, on one hand, a big amount of information is processed with the help of ERP systems during the collaboration, on the other hand, the cross-enterprise process itself as a whole is hidden from the particular ERP vendor.
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