High-level business processes for agile B2B collaboration

Increasingly, more businesses are collaborating to leverage on the competencies of potential partners in furtherance of common goals. Although best sourcing is the mantra of the day, many businesses are finding it more efficacious to form business alliances supported by IT-enabled business processes. In today's dynamic, fluid business environment, short term collaborations are frequent. The problem with short term collaborations is that common (public) business processes have to be revised every time a change is encountered. This is cumbersome as it is not good for business processes to change every time a change takes place. It is better to define public business processes at a higher level of abstraction so they can be altered with minimal impact on the company's private processes. This paper discusses business process concepts and how a public business process for B2B collaboration can be formulated, into which the private business processes of collaborators can simply be "plugged". An industrial example of a semiconductor wafer fabrication plant is discussed. The authors believe that this approach lays the foundation for automating the search for and selection of potential business collaborators in truly agile B2B collaboration.