A platform for automated interoperability inside a networked enterprise: Facilitating e-Business between Manufacturers, Suppliers, Retailers and Shops

Abstract

The European Furniture industry is the most important worldwide. To keep this leadership within the emerging digital economy, it is essential to reach shortly a universal agreement for electronic data exchange between the parties working for this industrial sector. Typically in most of the SME-based industrial sectors, where furniture industry is included, the Business-to-Business (B2B) offer is seller-driven, due to the fact that the product distribution sector is even more fragmented than production. This means that frequently a list of manufacturers offer their products and services through ad-hoc proprietary solutions (either on-line or CD-ROM based), starting corporate web sites with "order forms" within, or joining e-marketplaces (either vertical or general-purpose), where sometimes the rules are open, other times the membership is endangered by collusion due to the service ownership profile. Apart from the technical quality or the appropriateness in the market of one certain approach, all those solutions are most of the times not interoperable with each other. Different users from different e-marketplaces cannot interoperate, and the customer is wondering how they could make e-business with most of the providers in the same way. This issue is applicable both in the case of the furniture manufacturing willing to purchase on line from the materials supplier, and in the case of the distribution willing to interoperate with the product manufacturer. All these requests conduct to the requirement to have available an open platform for product and business data exchange, based on standard technology for data representation, supporting automated interoperability inside a networked global enterprise that could facilitate e-Business between Manufacturers, Suppliers, Retailers and Shops.