Discovering patterns for inter-organizational business process collaboration

In the area of business-to-business (B2B) collaboration for manufacturing, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are confronted with the problem of spending considerable time and effort on coordinating suppliers across multiple tiers of their supply chain. In tightly integrated supply chains, the failure of providing services and goods on time leads to interruptions of the overall production and subsequently results in customer dissatisfaction. This paper proposes the concept of electronic Sourcing eSourcing as a consolidating approach for improving the coordination of service provision across several tiers of a supply chain. eSourcing allows for the harmonization of heterogenous system environments of collaborating parties without requiring a total disclosure of internal business details to the counterpart. Furthermore, with tool support in eSourcing, it is possible to verify the correct termination of processes and the contractual adherence of service provision without imposing fixed standardized routing. In this paper features of the eSourcing concept are analyzed in a pattern-based way. This paper pursues an analysis of eSourcing patterns in a top-down way for constructing collaboration configurations. The discovered and specified eSourcing construction patterns of this paper are instrumental in the EU-FP6 project CrossWork for conducting case studies with industry partners from the automobile industry.