B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

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Com pa MY A
Figure 3.26.
Open Business
Process
Integration Patterns 91
Company B
Open process-based integration
3.5.2. Business process integration and B2Bi
BPI for B2B applications is based on shared processes, which represent
an extension of data exchange capabilities to include agreements on
multiple interdependent sets of messages. For example, two companies
might agree to an order management process that specifies how
acknowledgements are handled, the exception paths for order changes
and backorders, or other logic specific to the relationship between
buyer and seller.
Business process oriented integration has several benefits for an
organization and its trading partners. They include:
• Opportunity to redesign existing business processes and take out any
sort of latency involved.
• Ability to design, model, automate and execute new business processes
based on collaboration with the trading partners.
• Capability to hide the intricacies of how each company handles
internally the processing of data exchanged via messages based on
standard business semantics. As long as the format and semantics of
messages exchanged between companies remains the same, the
underlying application responsible for processing and generating
messages can change.