Business-to-Business E-Commerce for Collaborative Supply Chain Design and Development

Abstract

SMEs form a virtual enterprise—a short-term loose integration, to meet business opportunities; managers of SMEs are looking for a tool that could help them design the strategic model of the supply chain in which they are collaboratively involved. Though the use of e-commerce tools has a lot of potential to improve an enterprise’s collaboration efforts with other enterprises, realizing an e-commerce tool that enables collaborative supply chain design and development is not easy, as collaborating enterprises may each use a different flavor of XML, multiple technology solutions, and have different business rules. This chapter presents a methodology for developing a new e-commerce tool to assist collaborative supply chain management. By this methodology, a new tool that is affordable by the SMEs and offers improved pipeline visibility could be easily implemented.