A case study of an inter-enterprise workflow-supported supply chain management system

Doing business over the Internet is cheap and convenient. This enlarges the view of enterprises and gives them an opportunity to select their partners. To support business-to-business operations, an information system (IS) with an embedded workflow management component is needed. The inherent characteristics of such a system makes it suitable to implement cross-organization management. Nowadays, however, these system additions are not common. When developing a supply chain management (SCM) system for a large motorcycle corporation in China, we had to construct an inter-enterprise architecture using the internet. The main part of this is a workflow-supported inner supply chain system and an integrated interface. In it, the business processes are defined and executed by the supply chain management system. The independent inner systems are connected by the integrated interface into a large, global, supply chain manage system to management business processes across the independent enterprises. This paper presents the system design and implementation and discusses our experiences and lessons learned.