Business Models for Coordinating Next Generation Enterprises

• Authors: Markus Rehfeldt;Klaus Turowski
• Venue: AIWORC '00 Proceedings of the Academia/Industry Working Conference on Research Challenges
• Year: 2000

Today most medium companies just start trying to optimize the coordination of their supply chain and the communication with their internal and external customers by using electronic networks together with electronic commerce techniques. However, the great majority of these enterprises are not exhausting the full potential that advanced support concepts like modern business-to-business coordination allow. First steps usually include the introduction of standard groupware applications and collaborations tools, e.g. company wide directory services, email, common server workspaces, shared timers, and organizers as a needed foundation to offer support for any distributed project or team structures. Those services are only semi-integrated on a low level within individual scope rather than an automated integration with all interaction processes. A more advanced component-based approach like taking active, adaptive, and automated agent technology for (semi-) automatic coordination of business tasks and distribution of information throughout the whole production networks allows for fall back concepts and ad-hoc workflow management. In addition, it sets up the basis for a successful knowledge management. Although these concepts have been addressed for some time in the scientific community, they still have not found their way into the business coordination within production networks. We present an approach how to integrate some of these concepts into next generation's business models that are characterized by electronic collaboration and the ongoing emergence of electronic markets.We focus on decentralized and virtual organizations that encompass multiple companies. These organizations need information systems that support communication and coordination at a comparatively high semantic level. Here agent-oriented technology paired with soft computing methods step in and allows an advanced co-ordination and collaboration. Production networks are linked together with intelligent software agents that are working with common knowledge, which is expressed using fuzzy rule bases. Thus, offering a dedicated support for next generation coordination needs and dynamic organizational structures. By using adaptive fuzzy agents that simplify and accelerate preliminary coordination, we show how to implement and how to improve inter-company coordination between (inter-) organizational units.