E-business Systems Research Articles

Standardization and Emerging IT standards for E-Business Systems

Standardization and Emerging IT standards for E-Business Systems

Collaborative process patterns for e-Business

The basic notions in computer supported work coordination in e-Business are communicative, institutional, and deontic notions such as obligation, responsibility, and trust. The Language Action approach that has a significant impact within CSCW, therefore, seems to be a most promising framework for designing e-Business systems. However, the penetration of the Language Action approach in industrial practice is still limited. We discuss some reasons for this state of affairs by identifying a number of problems that hinder an effective application of the Language Action approach. We propose modeling techniques and methodological guidelines that can contribute to the solution of these problems. These techniques and guidelines are based on three building blocks: a business model describing the values exchanged in an e-Business process, a formal and executable language based on communicating state machines, and an automated designer assistant that guides a user from a business model to an executable process model.

Case Study ERP Systems Extended to B2B e-Business

The paper presents the best practice case on ERP enabled B2B e-Business systems. The study is based on an in depth analysis of a leading FMCG company's experience on such initiative. The paper discusses how an ERP system can be used to optimise the entire supply chain functions along with the internal functions of an organisation. The significant improvement in the business performance particularly the achievement of negative working capital and reduction in channel inventory on post ERP implementation provides a new insight on value of an extended enterprise system.

Abstracts of Recent Articles and Literature

Abstracts of Recent Articles and Literature

Design and Implementation of an MVC-Based Architecture for E-Commerce Applications

Although the separation of a model from its visual representation (view) implies well-known benefits, available Java libraries do not sufficiently support this concept. This paper presents a straightforward way to smoothly enhance Java libraries in this direction independently of the particular graphic user interface (GUI) library. The lean framework JGadgets, which was inspired by the Oberon Gadgets system, allows developers to focus on model programming only. This significantly reduces development costs, in particular in the realm of quite simple, form-based GUIs, which are commonplace in commercial e-business systems. The authors first present a case study implemented on top of JGadgets that demonstrates the benefits of the MVC architecture. They then go on to sketch the reflection-based design of JGadgets itself.

A road map to becoming an intelligent e-business

This paper lays down a roadmap to becoming an intelligent e-business whereby employees, customers and business partners make use of shared common infrastructure technology components to conduct business, become business intelligent and to collaborate. It defines the business drivers and business requirements behind e-business, then shows how to achieve these goals by linking together operational systems, business intelligence systems and collaborative systems and accessing them via a single Web-based user interface (an enterprise information portal) personalised to the needs of internal and external users. Three types of intelligent e-business systems are discussed, business-to-employee (B2E), business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B), to show how all can be delivered from the same common technology components and how all can be integrated to drive consistency and commonality across the enterprise while allowing flexibility and personalisation in terms of usage. Finally, key business areas such as front-office customer relationship management, back-office supply-chain management and corporate systems are all discussed in the context of B2C, B2B and B2E intelligent e-business, to show how all of these areas can be rolled out on a Web backbone.