Collaboration Management Framework for integrating B-to-B and internal processes

Business-to-business transaction (process) standards such as RosettaNet define the format of business documents and short transactions (PIP), but do not define the framework for long and overall transactions between enterprise systems. Thus, it is not clear how to manage, track, or analyze such overall business transactions. This has become an extremely important problem in real business situations. The ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS) is a new standard to model more complicated business-to-business transactions, but its implementation framework to map executed processes to the original model has not yet been proposed. We propose a framework called the "Collaboration Management Framework" to solve this problem. Its central concept is the "conversation" which consists of a series of business documents exchanged under some common subjects among enterprises. The framework defines how to define, manage, and implement conversations. The framework enables integrating B-to-B (external) processes as well as inB (internal) processes being executed in multiple systems, and the building up a complete picture of a business model that can help track and analyze the system behavior. We describe the framework with processes defined by the ebXML BPSS, but it is also applicable to other systems such as legacy EDI, RosettaNet, and Web Services environments. The proposed framework has been successfully integrated into one of the major EAI and B-to-B integration products in Japan.