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E-business frameworks providing standards and specifications that aim at enabling integrating the enterprise applications of business partners with relative ease have been recently proposed. This paper reports on experiences gained from developing a prototype system for integrating design document management systems based on the RosettaNet e-business framework. We present the requirements for the prototype, extracted from a case study of a product development network, and the design and implementation of the system. We then discuss the experiences gained in the light of the feasibility of applying such frameworks and their supporting technologies as foundations for e-business. The RosettaNet e-business framework was found to be relatively easy to implement and use. However, the RosettaNet specifications for product development processes and the related business document definitions, e.g. for design document delivery, are not sufficient in all respects. As a consequence, two implementations of the same RosettaNet standard process may be incompatible, and thus the aim of providing easy integration may fail. Furthermore, the effort required to build the system and fill in the missing parts in RosettaNet to integrate the product design activities may risk the goal of easy integration.

Networked product development is becoming an important topic for many industrial companies due to the need to improve the performance of product development processes. In product development, product data management (PDM) systems are typically used to store and manage the information related to the developed products and thus business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce in this context requires integration of heterogeneous PDM systems located in different companies. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of B2B integrations (B2Bi) that enable e-commerce in the context of networked product development. The basis for this paper is a set of semi-structured interviews conducted among the representatives of PDM and B2Bi personnel in three companies, and the experiences gained on constructing a laboratory prototype of PDM systems integration using the RosettaNet standard. We argue that there is a unique phase in the B2Bi implementation process in the context of networked product development that we call project-level integration. This phase arises from the project-oriented nature of product development, and recognizing it seems important for the successful implementation of B2Bi in the context of networked product development.