B2B Integration Research Articles

Towards a B2B integration framework for smart services in Industry 4.0

With the emergence of Industry 4.0, a transformation of value creation was initiated. Data-driven services, so-called smart services, which use data analysis techniques such as machine learning, are becoming increasingly important in new business models and the inter-company data exchange processes required for this. This paper examines both technical and business model aspects regarding the handling of data in the environment of Industry 4.0 use cases and their implications towards a B2B integration framework. It considers the provision and use of smart services in mechanical and plant engineering after-sales and develops a holistic approach for ensuring and managing internal and inter-company service integration. On the basis of use-cases carried out within a research project, the concept is implemented and evaluated.

Magic XPI Integration Component - EDI

The electronic data exchange between B2B partners through EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) enables your company to continuously digitize and automate business processes. This results in more efficiency and easy, as well as cost savings as per document, but requires the support of different formats, message standards, and communication protocols. Organization offers a standard solution for B2B integration and electronic data exchange with the Magic EDI Service Platform. Whether you are a customer, supplier you can now exchange data electronically with all your partners.

A Study of the State of Art B2B Integration Patterns, Components and Architectures

A Study of the State of Art B2B Integration Patterns, Components and Architectures

Efficient execution of web navigation sequences

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration and automated testing of web applications. Most current systems build the automatic web navigation component by using the APIs of conventional browsers. While this approach has its advantages, it suffers performance problems for intensive web automation tasks which require real time responses and/or a high degree of parallelism. In this paper, we outline a set of techniques to build a web navigation component able to efficiently execute web navigation sequences. These techniques detect what elements and scripts of the pages accessed during the navigation sequence are needed for the correct execution of the sequence (and, therefore, must be loaded and executed), and what parts of the pages can be discarded. The tests executed with real web sources show that the optimized navigation sequences run significantly faster and consume significantly less resources.

Iterative Effort Reduction in B2B Schema Integration via a Canonical Data Model

Nowadays, B2B integration still remains a big cost driver for companies. On the one hand, standardization efforts were able to reduce the mapping effort between e-Business schemas. However, the effort for creating customized messages from the huge and underspecified standard templates increased. Due to the myriad of different requirements by different companies, a great variety of standards coexist. Instead of forcing companies to adopt huge standards, this article propagates an iteratively improving schema and mapping derivation system in the cloud. Thus, we provide flexibility, but streamline companies' integration efforts based on an evolving canonical data model. This approach reduces the need for explicit standardization to a minimum. Our simulation based on real schemas shows a potential to reduce guide creation effort by 50% and mapping effort from 6% to almost 100%.

A management and orchestration model for integrating Digital Business Ecosystems

The aim of this study is to build a coordination model for Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) integration, and in particular to explore how various types of coordination mechanisms are related to creating value for different stakeholders in this context. The research design combines several data sources and methods. First, a coordination model is built based on existing literature, and generic success factors are identified on the basis of expert interviews. Second, the model is tested on information concerning global B2B integration gathered from key-informant focus groups. The results illustrate how specific coordination mechanisms related to network management and orchestration could be designed for DBE integration, and how they affect the success factors from the stakeholder and value-creation perspectives. Managers will be able to use the model in designing different network-coordination mechanisms to improve the implementation of B2B integration.

A process model to guide the integration of business processes and services within and across organisations

Organisations are facing a major transformation from application-based to service-oriented architecture. It is the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are especially confronted with both the opportunity and increasing pressure to establish efficient business-to-business (b2b) integration solutions to stay competitive in the globalised economy. As this integration involves business processes, services and technologies, they are complex and multi-disciplinary by nature and organisations have the need for a properly planned, methodological approach. To guide organisations in that process this paper introduces a process model for business integration. The methodology comprises an initial exploratory study, a thematic analysis focusing on process models in scientific literature, consolidated requirements for the model, and case studies conducted to refine and prove the practical applicability of the proposed process model. The process model was finally consolidated using triangulation of the results.

From E-commerce to Social Commerce: A Framework to Guide Enabling Cloud Computing

Social commerce is doing commerce in a collaborative and participative way, by using social media, through an enterprise interactive interface that enables social interactions. Technologies such as Web 2.0, Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enable social commerce. Yet, a framework for social commerce, putting Enterprise Social Interactions as central entities, would provide a strong business justification for social commerce design and adoption with these enabling technologies. This work first proposes a framework for social commerce-oriented business that captures: (a) three main entities: Enterprise social Interactions, Actors, and Business Processes (and their output: products/services), (b) the relationships between these entities, and (c) the constraints (if any). Then, it focuses on the conceptualization of the key entity, Enterprise Social Interactions, to shape the required enterprise interface that promotes openness, collaboration and participation, which enables the required knowledge emergence and intelligence for the value (co-)creation. A central component of the enterprise technology architecture, we refer to as Enterprise Social Interaction Manager (ESIM) realizes the interface. An example shows how the realization of the ESIM functionalities with Web 2.0, Cloud computing, and SOA enables the different categories of collaborative B2B integration that underlines and backs social commerce.

Improving Purchasing Performance by Implementation of QMS Process Management Approach in a Manufacturing Company

Process oriented approach in quality management system has been introduced with ISO9001:2000. The international standard promotes the adoption of a process approach when developing, implementing and improving the effectiveness of a QMS to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting customer requirement. The advantage of process approach is to link all parties in scope of business of the organization from suppliers, internal departments of organization to gather to make B2B communication and integration. In this paper, the process approach is defined based on QMS requirement. Supply department was proposed for implementation of process. Purchasing process was designed as a linkage between supplier and internal company departments. Performance indicators were developed and measured accordingly. It shows that process management can improve delivery capability, quality and monitor price of supplied parts by suppliers.

Mapping between heterogeneous XML and OWL transaction representations in B2B integration

XML-based standards have been widely used to enable and ease Business-to-Business (B2B) integration. Examples of standards include cXML, CIDX and ebXML. While these XML-based standards are syntactic, contemporary organizations have available new means to structure their internal data representations using semantic descriptions, such as RDF(S) and OWL. This scenario poses an interesting challenge: “How to reconcile external XML-based standards and internal OWL-based representations in B2B integration scenarios?” In this paper, we present a conceptual approach, and its implementation, to integrate external syntactic data representations with organizational internal semantic data representations by using the notion of heterogeneous mappings which are established between the two types of representations. The application developed, B2BISS, enables an effective management of mappings. As the number of mappings stored in the repository increases over time, organizations can gradually rely on a semi-automatic to automatic B2B integration.

B2B integration in global supply chains: An identification of technical integration scenarios

The competitiveness of businesses is increasingly dependent on their electronic networks with customers, suppliers, and partners. While the strategic and operational impact of external integration and IOS adoption has been extensively studied, much less attention has been paid to the organizational and technical design of electronic relationships. The objective of our longitudinal research project is the development of a framework for understanding and explaining B2B integration. Drawing on existing literature and empirical cases we present a reference model (a classification scheme for B2B Integration). The reference model comprises technical, organizational, and institutional levels to reflect the multiple facets of B2B integration. In this paper we investigate the current state of electronic collaboration in global supply chains focussing on the technical view. Using an in-depth case analysis we identify five integration scenarios. In the subsequent confirmatory phase of the research we analyse 112 real-world company cases to validate these five integration scenarios. Our research advances and deepens existing studies by developing a B2B reference model, which reflects the current state of practice and is independent of specific implementation technologies. In the next stage of the research the emerging reference model will be extended to create an assessment model for analysing the maturity level of a given company in a specific supply chain.

Automated browsing in AJAX websites

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration, automated testing of web applications or technology and business watch. One crucial part in web automation applications is for them to easily generate and reproduce navigation sequences. This problem is specially complicated in the case of the new breed of AJAX-based websites. Although recently some tools have also addressed the problem, they show some limitations either in usability or their ability to deal with complex websites. In this paper, we propose a set of new techniques to build an automatic web navigation system able to deal with these complexities. Our main contributions are: a new method for recording navigation sequences able to scale to a wider range of events, an algorithm to identify in a change-resilient manner the target element of a user action, and a novel method to detect when the effects caused by a user action (including the effects of scripting code and AJAX requests) have finished. In addition, we have also tested our approach with a high number of real web sources and have compared it with other relevant web automation tools obtaining very good results.

A Knowledge-Based Framework for Measuring Organizational Readiness for the Adoption of B2B Integration Systems

Organizational readiness has long been identified as a critical success factor for the adoption of inter-organizational systems. This article presents a knowledge-based methodology for constructing readiness assessment instruments for B2B integration solutions and examines its validation by conducting structural equation modeling analysis with input data from wholesale trading firms in Greece. Strong emphasis is given to the usability and appropriateness of the produced indicators and the relevant gap in literature is addressed. The B2Bi success factors that are presented and the final set of their underlying indicators can provide a starting point for conducting organizational readiness evaluations for the successful adoption of multi-enterprise integration solutions. Our methodology and findings can assist enterprises and public bodies to utilize, share, and enrich a knowledge base about B2Bi organizational readiness, throughout their evolution as part of the Knowledge Society.

EDI-based and XML-based business-to-business integration: a statistical analysis

This paper analyses six factors that are expected to facilitate Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)-based or Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based Business-to-Business (B2B) integration. Following the Technology-Organisation-Environment (TOE) framework, the paper focuses on one technological factor, four organisational factors and one environmental factor. An e-business framework is a standard for business documents, business processes and messaging interfaces in B2B integration. Six hypotheses on the use of EDI-based or XML-based e-business frameworks are based on the literature. These hypotheses are tested using logistic regression analysis. The data involve 3619 European companies. Large numbers of enterprise information systems and company employees facilitate the use of e-business frameworks. A high volume of sales and educational level of the employees in the company facilitate especially the use of XML-based e-business frameworks. Moreover, if the company primarily has other companies as customers, it is more likely to use an e-business framework. The number of sites in the company has no effects on this use.

Semantically-enabled service oriented architecture : concepts, technology and application

Semantically enabled service-oriented architecture focused on principles of service orientation, semantic modeling, intelligent and automated integration defines grounds for a cutting-edge technology which enables new means to integration of services, more adaptive to changes in business requirements which occur over systems’ lifetime. We define the architecture starting from a global perspective and through Web service modeling ontology as its semantic service model we narrow down to its services, processes and technology we use for the reference implementation. On a B2B integration scenario we demonstrate several aspects of the architecture and further describe the evaluation of the implementation according to a community-agreed standard evaluation methodology for semantic-based systems.

Towards a workflow‐based integration architecture for business networking

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show how workflow management can be applied in the context of business networking.Design/methodology/approachThe paper looks at workflow management systems (WfMSs) as an enterprise integration tool and, as such, it shows that WfMS require an appropriate integration infrastructure. The paper then describes how a WfMS that supports business networking can be built.FindingsIt is found that business networking requires a decentralized, peer‐to‐peer (P2P) integration infrastructure. On the other hand, it is found that it is possible to develop a generic and reusable workflow engine. Both components are then integrated in order to come up with a solution that supports business networking.Research limitations/implicationsIssues concerning information and document management are not addressed. Neither mechanisms of storage and retrieval of exchanged documents, nor the format/structure of those documents are specified.Practical implicationsThe paper assumes that enterprises will be willing to build up a P2P network where they will conduct their business‐to‐business (B2B) exchanges. Then, the proposed solution would allow their business processes to be linked without requiring tight coupling between their information systems.Originality/valueThe paper is useful to IT strategists and researchers dealing with WfMS, B2B integration architectures and applications of P2P technology.

Business-to-Business Explained

B2B Integration: Concepts and Architecture is an excellent textbook for beginners as well as a good reference book for experienced IT architects. The book gives us a solid business integration foundation. The five-part book begins by introducing B2B integration, defining integration concepts and architecture, and classifying the integration functionality.

IPSI-PF.A business process matchmaking engine based on annotated finite state automata

Success of Web services mainly depends on the availability of tools facilitating usage of technology within the addressed B2B integration problems. One severe problem in loosely coupled systems is service discovery including a sufficient matchmaking definition. The concept for service discovery in web service architecture is UDDI providing limited querying functionality and not being capable to deal with the multiple dimensions of a service, like for example semantic, workflow, or Quality of Service aspects. The IPSI Process Finder (IPSI-PF) realizes service discovery by extending the capabilities of UDDI by matchmaking of service descriptions. The extension is realized such that an integration of additional extensions can be added quite easily.

Flexible B2B processes: the answer is in the nodes

The time and costs involved in connecting the IT systems of two companies impact the actual formation of business relationships. A flexible infrastructure for process management is instrumental for rapid and cost-effective B2B integration. One dimension of flexibility that system integrators identify as critical is node-level interaction. In this paper, we discuss the findings of the Nile project on B2B process integration. In particular, we present the methodology defined in Nile for the semi-automatic reconciliation of node-level incompatibilities.

Web Services: An Analysis of the Technology, its Benefits, and Implementation Difficulties

Software reuse and systems interoperability have been primary goals of many IT organizations, especially those that rely heavily on computer networks. Object-oriented (OO) technology has been utilized to accomplish these goals with relative success over the years; but there are many hurdles that OO technology could not overcome. One of them is due to lack of standards. An object developed in one vendor's technology cannot easily communicate with another's. Another difficulty is that the majority of software applications reside behind firewalls – security barriers that restrict communication between networks. Web services, self-describing services that can easily be consumed over the Web, is the latest trend in the industry to address the problems identified above. Web services enable a group of related applications to be programmatically invoked over the Internet. They are rapidly emerging as important building blocks for business integration. Companies are finding important Web service applications in B2B, B2C, and enterprise application integration solutions. This article reviews the technical underpinnings of Web services and discusses their business opportunities and potential benefits. It also assesses the challenges and implementation difficulties of the technology.