Exploring Dynamic Inter-Organizational Business Process Collaboration

In B2B-collaboration, original equipmentmanufacturers are confronted with spendingconsiderable time and effort on coordinatingsuppliers across multiple tiers of their supplychain. In tightly integrated supply chains, thefailure of providing services and goods on time leadsto interruptions of the overall production andresults in customer dissatisfaction. Collaboratingparties must be able to set up aninter-organizational business process by disclosingto each other only as much as necessary. At the sametime, checking the correctness of aninter-organizational business process must not forcethe collaborating parties into revealing theirprocess internals to each other. However, in B2Bcollaborations, the ability of keeping internalbusiness activities secret is important for retaininga competitive advantage. Hence, this book proposesthe eSourcing concept for improving the coordinationof service provision across several tiers of a supplychain. eSourcing allows the external harmonization ofbusiness processes and the internal integration ofheterogeneous system environments without requiringcollaborating parties to disclose internal businessdetails to the counterparts.

PhD: Studied business informatics at JohannesKepler University and the University of Manchester. He receivedhis doctorate degree from TU-Eindhoven and is currently apost-doc researcher at the University of Helsinki. His researchinterests include business process collaboration,service-oriented computing, software architectures.