Service orchestration approaches are widely used to composing multiple business services (partner services) into a business process to achieve a particular business objective. The business relationships captured in such a service orchestration are primarily those between the partner services and the business process itself. This however results in tight-coupling between processes and partner se...

This paper elaborates on why and how business relationships develop through an indepth study of a world-leading industrial tooling company (ITC). The study of the ITC focuses on the development of a “preferred supplier” concept, developed in the UK subsidiary since the mid-1990’s. The aim was to capture business volume at customers through greatly increased embeddedness from a legal, technical ...

In spite of the continuous development of the e-commerce, the vast competitiveness that exists in the online context makes it necessary to reinforce the ties established with current customers. In this respect, relationship commitment has been considered as a key factor for maintaining successful long-term relationships with customers. However, there are few studies that analyze the commitment ...

Relationships are fundamental to all but the most impersonal forms of interaction in business. An agent aims to secure projected needs by attempting to build a set of (business) relationships with other agents. A relationship is built by exchanging private information, and is characterised by its intimacy — degree of closeness — and balance — degree of fairness. Each argumentative interaction b...

As per the Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce, the estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the first quarter of 2009 was $31.7 billion. For the same period, e-commerce accounted for 3.5 percent of total sales with a value of $30.2 billion sales. As electronic business (e-business) has become essential in our economy, organizations have begun to demand a return on their investment ...

Electronic collaborative networks are a prevailing concept in actual scientific business management literature. Because of the occurrence of newly concepts as “service orientation” and service oriented architectures, electronic networks and business intelligence, has gained momentum and revival. In the paper we look at the conceptual design of a framework for the development of collaborative se...

Based on cost savings and efficiency gains in past business process outsourcing (BPO) projects, firms increasingly consider outsourcing knowledge-intensive and strategically oriented business processes. However, the success of these strategic BPO projects entails strong commitment from both the client and the service provider to leverage interfirm resources and engage in close collaboration to ...

This paper presents the results from four short case studies about relationships between banks and their business clients in Portugal. It shows important insights on irregularities that impact as temporary reductions in the volume of business in those relationships. The paper provides interesting material for managers and researchers alike to better understand the nature of banking relationships.