Discovering Patterns for Inter-Organizational Business Collaboration in a Top-Down Way

In the area of business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are confronted with the problem of spending a 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 as a new approach for improving the coordination of service provision across several tiers of a supply chain. Sourcing 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 Sourcing it is possible to verify the correct termination of processes and the contractual adherence of service provision without imposing fixed standardized routing. As Sourcing is a new proposal for B2B supply-chain collaboration, this paper analyses features of the Sourcing concept in a pattern-based way. However, differently to intra-organizational perspectives such as control-flow, data-flow, or resource, where established in-house workflow systems and web service composition languages (WSCLs) were analyzed for patterns, this paper pursues an analysis of Sourcing patterns in a top-down way. The reason for proceeding top-down is a lack of available systems for B2B collaboration that have gone through a lengthy period of adoption to real world business activities. The discovered and specified Sourcing patterns of this paper are instrumental in the EU-FP6 project CrossWork for the conduction of case studies with industry partners from the automobile industry.