Business-to-Business E-Commerce Frameworks

E lectronic commerce lets people purchase goods and exchange information on business transactions online. The most popular e-commerce channel is the Internet. Although the Internet's role as a business channel is a fairly recent phenomenon, its impact, financial and otherwise, has been substantially greater than that of other business channels in existence for several decades. E-commerce gives companies improved efficiency and reliability of business processes through transaction automation. There are two major types of e-commerce: business to consumer (B2C), in which consumers purchase products and services from businesses , and business to business (B2B), in which businesses buy and sell among themselves. A typical business depends on other businesses for several of the direct and indirect inputs to its end products. For example, Dell Computer depends on one company for microprocessor chips and another for hard drives. B2B e-commerce automates and streamlines the process of buying and selling these intermediate products. It provides more reliable updating of business data. For procurement transactions, buyers and sellers can meet in an electronic marketplace and exchange information. In addition, B2B makes product information available globally and updates it in real time. Hence, procuring organizations can take advantage of vast amounts of product information. B2C e-commerce is now sufficiently stable. Judging from its success, we can expect B2B to similarly improve business processes for a better return on investment. Market researchers predict that B2B transactions will amount to a few trillion dollars in the next few years, as compared to about 100 billion dollars' worth of B2C transactions. B2C was easier to achieve, given the relative simplicity of reaching its target: the individual consumer. That's not the case with B2B, which involves engineering the interactions of diverse, complex enterprises. Interoperability is therefore a key issue in B2B. To achieve interoperability, many companies have formed consortia to develop B2B frameworks—generic templates that provide functions enabling businesses to communicate efficiently over the Internet. The consor-tia aim to provide an industrywide standard that companies can easily adopt. Their work has resulted in several technical standards. Among the most popular are Open Buying on the Internet (OBI), eCo, RosettaNet, commerce XML (cXML), and BizTalk. The problem with these standards, and many others, is that they are incompatible. Businesses trying to implement a B2B framework are bewildered by a variety of standards that point in different directions. Each standard has its merits and demerits. To aid decision-makers in choosing …