attention from entrepreneurs, executives, investors, and industry observers. In commenting about the impact of Internet technology and E-commerce on the world’s economy, former Vice President Al Gore stated: We are on the verge of a revolution that is as profound as the change in the economy that came with the industrial revolution. Soon electronic networks will allow people to transcend the ba...

• Customer satisfaction: The result of optimizing and aligning business processes to fulfi ll customers’ needs, wants, and desires. • Cost reduction: The result of optimizing operations and supplier processes. • Cycle and fulfi llment time reduction: The result of optimizing the manufacturing and logistics processes. • Quality: The result of optimizing the design, development, and production pr...

Business-to-business electronic commerce (B2B EC) opens up new possibilities of trade. For example, new business partners from around the globe can be found, their offers can be compared, even complex negotiations can be conducted electronically, and a contract can be drawn up and fulfilled via an electronic marketplace. However, a sophisticated data management is required to provide such facti...

E-businesses play a critical role in today's knowledge-based economies. Despite their ‎increasing portion, e-businesses experience high rates of failure. Therefore, it is of prime ‎importance to identify their decision-making activities encountering outer competitive forces ‎and their internal structural events. In this study, through using the Grounded Theory approach, we ‎analyze interviews c...

Business-to-business (B2B) integration only succeeds if the messages sent by the cooperating enterprises comply to a business enterprise ontology (BEO). This ensures that the cooperating enterprises have a common understanding of the message exchanged. However, enterprise internal back end application systems follow their own BEO. This requires a transformation between the exchanged messages an...