An Approach to the Construction of Flexible B2B E-Contracting Processes

In business-to-business relations, contracts serve both as a protection mechanism of trading parties, as well as a prescription document for activities to be executed by them. The processes of contract establishment and its enactment are often expensive and time-consuming. E-contracting aims at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the contracting process. Additionally, it offers new opportunities to the contracting parties, e.g. micro-contracting. For the design of an information system for support of e-contracting, a clear description of the e-contracting processes is required. In this report, we introduce a process model for flexible business-to-business e-contracting. To separate concerns, we distinguish structured function and communication perspectives of e-contracting processes supplemented with consistency rules. Using the defined model we propose an approach for elaboration of concrete e-contracting process specifications and their implementation in real-life business scenarios. The approach is a basis for complete functional e-contracting process specifications, with coherent communication between contracting parties and coupling between the internal and external activities of a company.