Abstract
This article focuses on the most important technological challenges and issues facing e-collaboration and ebusiness in the areas of information flow, procurement, logistics, engineering and manufacturing, marketing, customer services, and human resources. It deals specifically with the process and system alignment and integration as well as the issues of interoperability which have become of primary concerns in the practices of e-collaboration.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Integration: Integration refers to collaborative planning and control, decision integration, information integration and business process integration between interfirm partners, using information technologies and systems.
E-Supply Cchain Interoperability: The ability to be fully compatible and capable of being integrated with each other in e-business supply chain.
E-Partnership: Theoretically, e-partnership refers to a business partnership relying on electronic (information) technologies to communicate and interact amongst partners. As e-business has become an integral part of most business practices where consumers, suppliers, buyers are connected by information technologies, the term e-partnership is mostly associated with electronic commerce partnerships, and in a broader sense, electronic business partnerships.
RosettaNet Standards: RosettaNet standards prescribe how networked applications interoperate to execute collaborative business process. They provide a common language for B2B transactions and assist in building integrative e-business processes among partners. RosettaNet standards consist of a three-level business process architecture for interaction between inter-firm e-partners: (i) partner interface processes, (ii) RosettaNet dictionaries, including the Master Dictionary which contains over 6000 common terms and processes, and grammar that describes how systems communicate, and (iii) RosettaNet implementation framework (RNIF).
E-Collaboration: E-collaboration refers to the use of the Internet and/or Internet-based tools among business partners beyond market transactions. The term is often used in the context of supply chain, in particular, in supply-buyer relationships.
E-SCM (E-Supply Chain Management): E-SCM as the latest advance of SCM has two pillars: the emerging strategic capabilities of SCM and the Web technologies that empower SCM. E-SCM aims to foster agile organizations and supplier-buyer partnerships.
Informediary: As the name suggests, infomediaries specialize in information management, collecting and storing customer information and controlling the flow of commerce on the Web. Yahoo! is one of the most popular and powerful infomediaries in the world.