Empowering collaborative commerce with Web services enabled business process management systems [An article from: Decision Support Systems]

This digital document is a journal article from Decision Support Systems, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Collaborative commerce (C-Commerce) is a set of technologies and business practices that allows companies to build stronger relationships with their trading partners through integrating complex and cross-enterprise processes governed by business logic and rules, as well as workflows. Business Process Management (BPM) is a key element of C-Commerce solutions for complex process coordination. It provides a mechanism to support e-businesses in modeling, deploying, and managing business processes that involve various applications with greater flexibility. Traditional BPM solutions often lack the capability to integrate external applications in that they have very limited support for interoperability. In recent years, Web services have emerged as a promising enabling technology for BPM in support of C-Commerce. Web services offer effective and standard-based means to improve interoperability among different software applications over Internet protocols. This paper aims to give an in-depth analysis of BPM and Web services in the context of C-Commerce. We propose an architecture for Web services enabled BPM in C-Commerce and provide technical insights into why Web services can enhance business process coordination. Finally, an implementation of a dynamic e-procurement application based on the proposed architecture is presented. With the advent of Web service standards and business process integration tools that support them, BPM systems enabled by Web services are empowering the development of more flexible and dynamic C-Commerce.