B2B E-commerce Systems Research Articles

Critical success criteria for B2B E-commerce systems in Chinese medical supply chain

The paper presents an exploratory investigation to determine and prioritise the critical success criteria, which can measure and guide the successful application and performance improvement of business to business e-commerce system (BBECS) in a medical supply chain's selling and buying functions, in the context of global business expansion. The research reveals that the buying and the selling functions have different prioritisations on the majority of the determined critical success measuring criteria. These criteria are categorised into three Critical Success Measuring Criteria Groups, for the selling and the buying functions, respectively, guiding medical supply chain members in harnessing the full advantage of a BBECS. For the selling function, the top critical success measuring criteria are as follows: integrating information searching/transmission and application processes, ensuring the reliability and timeliness of technical support, ensuring recognition and acceptance of e-commerce processes, displaying the organisation's business focus and product/service provisions online, securing a large scale/amount of business transactions, adjusting production outputs and inventory levels and having more registered users than competitors do. The top critical success measuring criteria for the buying function are as follows: securing the establishment of business relationships between businesses, displaying the measures ensuring mutual trust and cooperation online, ensuring employees' recognition of the benefit of e-commerce in increasing revenue, ensuring the contribution to the development and realisation of corporate strategy, achieving cost reduction for the organisation, making the purchase of famous brand products available/doable, securing a large scale/amount of business transactions, and ensuring the attainability of products/services at a lower price.

Determining Effective Elements on Participation in a B2B E-commerce System by Considering Time and Cost

In recent decades, most of the businesses were started using electronic commerce. Today, B2B is the most popular model of electronic commerce. One of the issues in B2B systems is Participation. Participation means taking apart or gets involving for doing some tasks in a development process. However there are many studies on collaboration and communication in a B2B system, lack of study in participation is observed. A qualitative method based on interview, in a case study, was used for data collection. As a result, effective elements including centralized database, communication, accessibility, paperless work cycle and collaboration in a B2B system, can improve the participation significantly. 

A Model of a Localized Cross-Border E-Commerce

By the explosive growth of B2B e-commerce transactions in international supply chains and the rapid increase of business documents in Iran’s cross-border trading, effective management of trade processes over borders is vital in B2B e-commerce systems. Structure of the localized model in this paper is based on three major layers of a B2B e-commerce infrastructure, which are messaging layer, business process layer and content layer. For each of these layers proper standards and solutions are chosen due to Iran’s e-commerce requirements. As it is needed to move smoothly towards electronic documents in Iran, UNedocs standard is suggested to support the contents of both paper and electronic documents. The verification of the suggested model is done by presenting a four phase scenario through case study method. The localized model in this paper tries to make a strategic view of business documents exchange in trade processes, and getting closer to the key target of regional single windows establishment in global trade e-supply chains.

능동문서: 서식설계자의 프로그램

웹은 정보 제공원으로서 중요한 역할을 하며 대부분의 웹 응용프로그램은 문서 중심이다. 문서는 문서설계자의 의도를 함축하고 있으며 이는 업무처리 과정의 자동화에 적극적으로 활용될 수 있다. 이러한 문서기능의 본질 파악을 통해 본 논문에서는 특별한 경우, 문서를 실행 가능한 컴퓨터 프로그램으로 보는 시각으로 접근하였다. 이를 위해 서식, 지식베이스, 규칙 그리고, 질의로 구성되는 능동문서 모델을 제안하였다. 이 모델의 각 요소는 문서의 재사용과 상호 운용성을 위해 XML로 일관되게 표현된다. 소개한 능동문서는 사용자 인터페이스를 제공하는 수동적인 역할뿐만 아니라 문서설계자가 의도하는 문서처리 절차와 업무규칙을 기계가 읽고 추론하여 처리할 수 있게 하는 문서이다. 이를 통해 문서와 기계가 상호작용을 할 수 있으며 다른 응용 프로그램과 협력할 수도 있다. 이러한 능동문서의 적용 가능함을 보이기 위해 기업 간 거래(B2B) 시스템에서 구매주문 처리의 예를 보였다. 서식문서를 컴퓨터 프로그램의 시각으로 바라보는 본 논문의 접근법을 통해 본 연구는 문서중심의 지능적인 응용프로그램 개발을 가속화하는 발판을 마련할 수 있을 것이다. 요컨대 본 논문에서 제시한 능동문서는 지식표현 및 처리기능이 내장되어 있는 바, 시맨틱 웹(Semantic Web)이 추구하는 문서의 역할을 담당할 수 있을 것으로 기대한다. The Web plays an important role as information source and most Web applications are document-centric. A document implies an intention of its own designer, which can be utilized actively in automation of business processes. Through an understanding of an intrinsic nature of a document function, we can see a document as an executable computer program in a special case. For this approach, we propose an active document model that is composed of form, knowledge base, rules, and queries. For reusability and interoperability of a document, each component of the proposed model is uniformly represented in XML. The proposed active document not only plays a passive role in providing user interfaces, but also is a document that a machine can infer and process with reading a procedure of document processing and business rules intended by document designers. Through this approach, document can interact with machines and can cooperate with other applications. For applicability of our active document, we show a case study for the processing of purchase orders in a B2B e-Commerce system. This paper is expected to provide the framework of accelerating the development of intelligent applications through our approach regards form document as a computer program. In short, the proposed active document contains knowledge representation and processing method, consequently our document will play an important role in providing a concept of document of pursuing in Semantic Web.

Control of B2B E-Commerce and the Impact on Industry Structure

A significant amount has been written concerning the transaction costs associated with B2B e-commerce. We take an alternative approach and explore the impact of increased use of B2B e-commerce on the structure and competitiveness of downstream industry activities. We argue that the openness of an industry's B2B e-commerce systems will have a direct effect on the structure of downstream industry activities. Industries where the B2B e-commerce systems are largely open to participation should experience increased heterogeneity and competition in downstream industry activities. Industries where the B2B e-commerce systems are largely closed should experience increased homogeneity and decreased competition in downstream industry activities. We further argue that the openness of the B2B systems will depend on the type of B2B systems that develops within a specific industry. Correspondingly, much attention should be given to the type of B2B e-commerce systems that emerge.

Evolution of the Use of IT for e-Business at Century Financial Services:

The case is based on one of the largest and oldest financial services companies in India, referred to as Century Financial Services. It explores the evolution of the use of information technology (IT) over time, from the use of basic efficiency enhancing systems to the development of advanced B2B and B2C E-Commerce systems. At each stage of the evolution, it describes the external drivers in terms of environmental changes, industry developments, customer demands and competitive pressures. It also presents the organizational factors influencing the evolution, in terms of leadership attitudes, the role of IS professionals, and aspects of organization culture. The case aims to give a comprehensive explanation of how internal and external factors together combined to change the focus of the company towards IT and influenced the adoption of E-Business. The case data was collected between April and August of 2000. Sources of data included past organizational documents, interviews, industry sources and databases, and secondary business literature.