Supplier Affiliated Extended Supply Chain Backbones

Abstract

E-commerce has progressed from the preliminary stages of brochure-ware to on-line transaction management, and is entering a phase where great opportunities exist in extended supply-chain over the Internet. Currently, much of the focus is on business-to-business e-commerce, where middleman hubs perform broker functions of search and comparison. Their value is derived from providing time and cost savings to participants. As XML semantics and other information sharing technologies become more standardized, and as behavioral aspects of Internet commerce become better established, we would expect the searching and comparison mechanics to become priced at their marginal costs. Business-to-business hubs, or interorganizational systems that do not add value in another way to the chain will find very little margins. In this paper, we examine issues related to Internet extended supply chain backbones from the supplier's viewpoint and discuss the information architecture of a third party software backbone and how it can provide value-added services to suppliers and OEMs via internetworking standards.