B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Business Process Management (BPM) 147
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with visibility in the manufacturing status of their products, allowing
more informed decisions.
• Ship Notice — TSMC notifies customers about finished products,
which provides them with advance information and progress updates.
With the implementation of Extricity B2B system, TSMC is
predicting a ROI of 1400% over a three-year period, which equates
to a five-month payback.
Source: Condensed from Extricity customer case study; The TSMC story, Extricity.com
5.4. Universal Language for BPM
There are several practical challenges in the real world implementation
of BPM. For instance, there are no de facto standards available for
business process modeling. Multiple groups demand different levels of
abstraction in the design and execution of processes, and different BPM
systems communicate by exchanging messages that have no standard
formats, making B2B-based business process integration challenging.
According to the Gartner Group, through 2005 no standard will fully
eliminate the requirement that enterprises must support multiple,
incompatible process-management-aware applications.
There is a need for a universal language, which can be used to design,
deploy, maintain and execute business processes, such as order management,
demand and forecast planning and new product development.
This language should represent all the internal and external activities
that support any company's business — for instance, synchronous and
asynchronous communication with all internal and external applications,
information dissemination, short and long-lived transactions. It should
be based on open architecture so that the process models among different
BPM systems can be exchanged and should enable the creation of
a common business process repository. Further, it should allow a
mechanism for expressing rules for business level validation of messages,
to link processes to events occurring in the environment and to express
data extraction. Finally, it should provide full support for the existing