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.

Document VersionPublisher's PDF, also known as Version of Record (includes final page, issue and volume numbers) Please check the document version of this publication:• A submitted manuscript is the author's version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website.• The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review.• The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publicationCitation for published version (APA): Grefen, P. W. P. J., Eshuis, H., Mehandjiev, N., Kouvas, G., & Weichhart, G. (2009). Internet-based support for process-oriented instant virtual enterprises. IEEE Internet Computing, 13(6), 65-73. DOI: 10.1109/MIC.2009 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Paul Grefen and Rik Eshuis Eindhoven University of Technology Nikolay Mehandjiev University of Manchester Giorgos Kouvas Exodus Georg WeichhartJohannes Kepler Universität Linz I n the past, businesses often operated in stand-alone mode or relied on rather static networks of cooperating organizations. Today, competition has become fiercer, fueled by relatively recent developments such as the globalization of business, shortened timeto-market requirements, and increased market transparency. Products and services to be delivered to customers are, on one hand, quickly increasing in complexity and, on the other, subject to increasingly frequent modifications and replacements. To comply with these market settings, organizations must shift their priorities to flexibility and the ability to change if they want to survive. Therefore, dynamically established cooperation among organizations is becoming much more of a requirement to meet market demands.Accordingly, we've seen the emergence of new business models focused on new business abilities that rely on intensive collaboration between autonomous business entities based on dynamic partnering. We call this model the instant virtual enterprise (IVE) -a temporary business entity executi...

No abstract

Both academic research and industrial practice recognize difficulties in translating the principles of service-dominant (S-D) business logic into actionable insights for practitioners, particularly when considering S-D logic at the strategic level. To address this problem, this paper focuses on the conceptualization, formulation, and communication of an S-D business strategy. From the theoretical standpoint, we conceptualize the elements of an S-D strategy by filtering the scattered literature about S-D strategy and business models through the lenses of traditional views of business strategy. From the practical standpoint, we develop a tool embedding our conceptual development to support practitioners in the formulation and communication of S-D strategy. While traditional strategy tools take a value chain perspective, our tool helps to position the focal organization at the center of a complex ecosystem of partners who are cocreating value. Following the principles of action design research, the tool is developed and evaluated in close collaboration with practice in a case study in the financial services industry. Consequently, this paper contributes both to the conceptual and the practical operationalization of S-D logic at the strategic level.

Business process standardization is the activity of unifying different variants of a family of business processes. While the positive effects of business process standardization are well-described, it is often undesirable to fully unify different variants due to cultural, legal, or operational reasons. Consequently, a decision has to be made about the extent to which a family of business processes should be standardized. However, little is known about the factors that drive that decision. This paper fills that gap, by presenting factors that drive the extent to which business processes can be standardized, performance properties that are influenced by business process standardization, and relations between these concepts.