Browsing by Author "Raus, Marta"

In this work, we propose a novel e-Business architecture that takes into account the specific needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The envisioned system supports collaborative and evolutionary modeling, semi-automatic negotiation and finally execution of business processes and ensures true interoperability through a common semantic repository. Potential business partners are enabled to easily retrieve each other and initiate business relations in an extremely intuitive manner. With the help of the Balanced Scorecard approach, we thoroughly investigate economic benefits SMEs will experience when participating at this system. The analysis highlights advantages regarding five different perspectives: SMEs may capitalize from reduced operating costs and improved gains (financial perspective), increased customer satisfaction and retention (customer perspective), faster and more efficient internal processes (internal working process perspective), improved supply chain integration (supply chain perspective), and technological advancements (system benefits).

Standardisation and interoperability efforts are ongoing within and across organisations on a local and global scale. In many cases, industry-focused standards advocates propose offerings from their organisations to any possibly- involved organisations in global trade. Given regulatory and security measures established by national, European and international authorities, Single Window Access, business-to-government (B2G) collaboration and Data Tagging along a trade chain require a standardisation concept that works for all involved trade partners regardless of the size and industrial ori- entation. Semantic standardisation as proposed by the successor of UN/EDIBookID FACT, the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) seems a promising approach. Thus far, it has not been tested in a complex environment, as, for example, in multi-national and interorganisational living labs. In this chapter we introduce the key aspects of UN/CEFACT and semantic standardisation. We illustrate the characteristics of semantic standardisations based not only on the findings of our work as Work Package 1 team, but also on our trials in selected living labs of the ITAIDE project. The prerequisites to make semantic standardisation work are then discussed based on experienced usability, benefits and limitations, and by disclosing further requirements that we have developed in our research. Moreover, the innovation in approaching standardisation as we have done is comprised of the connectedness of semantics, standards and regulations. The chapter closes with recommendations for making trusted trade networks executable.