ICT solutions for business network coordination

Projectomschrijving

Many organizations face the trends of increasing competition, reduced planning horizons, and customers enforcing their individual preferences and requirements. These organizations are challenged to simultaneously realize the expectations of
individual customers (one-to-one marketing) which are difficult to predict, as well as short delivery times and high levels of efficiency. For the organization of the future flexibility and efficiency are essential to survive. Management theorists like Porter, Prahalad and Hamel emphasize the necessity of clear strategic choices and operational excellence. In line with this reasoning companies will have to concentrate on core competencies, outsource those activities that are considered non-core, and to be agile and cost effective they will need to delayer their structures. As a result interdependencies between
organizations will increase. Legally independent organizations will cooperate within relatively stable business networks, however the pattern of cooperation may change with every customer order. In the world of Electronic Commerce a business
network, much more than a single cyber-store, will serve the final customer of the product/service delivered. All kinds of business networks are expected to arise, such as single supply chains, extended enterprises, or virtual enterprises.
Moreover, these networks may be created as a response to an order, grow or be killed off and thus show dynamic behavior. Also these networks will be global in nature, and cross national borders. This pattern of inter-organizational cooperation
requires capabilities for rapid exchange of information. Communication among supply chain members about customer demand and expected throughput times is becoming of critical importance. However current IT architectures are inadequate to support lateral processes in general and inter-organizational lateral processes in particular. They are not based on
interaction, in fact they operate in a way that is not essentially different from a procedural hierarchical approach. This research proposal deals with the problems of managing and structuring business network processes. The problems of re-arranging the way the company creates its economic value in cooperation with suppliers and customers and how this is
supported or enabled by information technology. An important discriminating factor of those business networks is how coordination of the activities between organizations is achieved. Electronic coordination constitutes an important element of electronic commerce after electrification of simple transactions between business partners. This program aims to promote a better understanding of inter-organizational coordination processes and focuses on the following issues: (l) analysis of electronic coordination of inter- organizational processes, (2) modeling of inter-organizational processes, and (3) design of
inter- organizational workflow solutions.

looptijd: 1 januari 2000 - 1 januari 2001
aangesteld: dr.ir. K. Huang (post-doc 1.0 fte)
deelnemende vakgroepen:
Faculteit der Economische Wetenschappen - KUB
Faculteit Technologie Management - TUE
projectleiders:
prof.dr. M. Papazoglou (KUB)
prof.dr. P. Ribbers (KUB)
prof.dr.ir. T. Veth (TUE)