Services innovation transforming B2B gateway

The objective of collaborative Business-to-Business (B2B) technologies is to minimize the gap between the trading partners. In the early 80s, the need for interactions among companies and their trading partners led to the development of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which for many years has been the most dependable way for companies to exchange B2B documents. However the deep learning curve and the cost of the required resources to support EDI prevented Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to adopt the technology in the automated trading processes. ebXML was introduced to overcome the excising shortcomings of EDI, but has its own limitations mainly reflected in its capability in providing decision support analysis and large scale concurrent applications. In this paper, a distributed user centric B2B gateway approach is presented to support trading partners. The gateway takes the leverages of services innovation integrating resources from traditional e-business environments with loosely coupled decision support resources to complete trading intelligently. The Australian retail sector has been chosen as an application domain in understanding the impact of the proposed solution.