Transformation of Business Processes of Export Companies to a Proposed Collaborative Environment with the Aid of Web Services and Mobile Technologies

Transformation of Business Processes of Export Companies to a Proposed Collaborative Environment with the Aid of Web Services and Mobile Technologies

Abbass Ghanbary, Manish Desai, Bhuvan Unhelkar
Copyright: © 2009 |Pages: 11
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-156-8.ch058
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Abstract

This chapter discusses the results of an action research project carried out at ImpexDocs in Sydney, Australia, by the lead author. The purpose of this action research was to investigate the business processes of companies involved in “EXPORTS” and to study how they collaborate with different service providers involved in exports from Australia. The report provides an insight in to understanding the applications of Collaborative Business Process Engineering (CBPE) in terms of improving the effectiveness and efficiency for all organizations involved in International Business, especially companies involved in exports and their associated service providers. The study demonstrates an understanding of the in-depth analyses of existing business processes, investigate the collaboration between the export companies system with other enterprises involved, investigate the existing channels of collaboration, investigate the common business processes threads through multiple application, investigate the applications that deal with external parties, and engineer collaborative processes across multiple organizations.
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Web Services And Mobile Technologies

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has defined Web Services as a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. Web Services can be understood through the Web services architecture that is, in fact, an interoperability architecture: it identifies those global elements of the global Web services network that are required in order to ensure interoperability between Web services (Booth, et al, 2004).

A Web Services (WS) is a delivery mechanism that can serve at the same time many different consumers on many multiple technological platforms. Web Services technology is an enabler to connect incompatible standalone systems to integrate a complex distributed system in a way that was not possible with previous technologies (Stacey & Unhelkar, 2004). WS are made up of the eXtensible Markup Langauge (XML), Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and the Universal Description and Discovery Integration (UDDI) stores both the technical information to build an application compatible with a Web services interface, as well as the information required to successfully bind to that interface at runtime. According to Unhelkar (2007), through the directory of the UDDI within the umbrella of WS, business can now register the services they are offering and allow the clients to search, locate and consume those services. The service properties within WS can be specified using a specific ontology (Leary & Salam & Singh, 2006)

Mobile technology has provided the organizations with a platform to access customers in special ways, reaching them through specific locations and otherwise providing a new value proposition (Unnithan, 2002). The correct application of mobile technologies into the business processes provides an opportunity for enterprises to gain advantages such as increased profits, satisfied customers and greater customer loyalty. These customer-related advantages will accrue only when the organization investigates its customer behaviour in the context of the mobile environment. Mobile Web Services (MWS) enable the creation of such environment. A MWS environment is capable of using Location Based Services and Global Positioning Services (GPS) which, as per Puustjarvi (2006) enable provision of location-specific services pertinent to their location.

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