Christian Pichler

State-of-the-art in business document standards

With the raising significance of electronic commerce and e-government applications the need for standardized business documents has emerged. Today, a business partner seeking to implement a new electronic commerce solution may choose from a multitude of different standards. Most of the standards are domain-specific and thus heterogeneous, since standards are developed out of diverse needs, motivations, and backgrounds. What is still missing is a thorough overview of business document standard families. Furthermore, a classification helping a business partner to choose a specific standard, based on his preferences is needed. In this paper we present the key results of our business document survey, where we made a classification of business document standards using standard categories. For each category we introduce a representative standard example. Based on our research results, a clear and precise classification of different business document standardization approaches is provided. Through the classification, the distinctive advantages and disadvantages of each standard become clear. Thus, the decision which business document standard to use is eased.

Process Mining for Electronic Data Interchange

Choreography modeling and service integration received a lot of attention in the last decade. However, most real-world implementations of inter-organizational systems are still realized by traditional Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards. In traditional EDI standards, the notion of process or choreography is not explicitly specified. Rather, every business document exchange stands for its own. This lack of process awareness in traditional EDI systems hinders organizations from applying Business Process Management (BPM) methods in such settings. To address this shortcoming, we seek to derive choreographies from EDI message exchanges. Thereby, we employ and extend process mining techniques, which have so far concentrated on business processes within single organizations. We discover the interaction sequences between the partners as well as the business information conveyed in the exchanged documents, which goes beyond the state-of-the-art in process mining. As a result, we lift the information gained on the IT level to the business level. This enables us to derive new insights that help organizations to improve their performance, e.g., an organization may get insights into the value of its business partnerships to support an efficient decision making process. This way we hope to bring the merits of BPM to inter-organizational systems realized by traditional EDI standards.

Inter-organizational success factors: a cause and effect model

Inter-organizational systems form the basis for successful business collaboration in the Internet and B2B e-commerce era. To properly design and manage such systems one needs to understand the structure and dynamics of the relationships between organizations. The evaluation of such inter-organizational relationships (IORs) is normally conducted using “success factors”. These are often referred to as constructs, such as trust and information sharing. In strategic management and performance analysis, different methods are employed for evaluating business performance and strategies, such as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) method. The BSC utilizes success factors for measuring and monitoring IORs against business strategies. For these reasons, a thorough understanding of success factors, the relationships between them, as well as their relationship to business strategies is required. In other words, understanding success factors allows strategists deriving measurements for success factors as well as aligning these success factors with business strategies. This underpins nowadays close relationship between business strategy, IORs and their realization by means of inter-organizational systems. In this paper, we present (1) a systematic literature review studying success factors and their impact on IORs as well as (2) an analysis of the results found. The review is based on 177 publications, published between 2000 and 2012, dealing with factors influencing IORs. The work presented provides an overview on success factors, influencing relationships between success factors, as well as their influence on the success of IORs. The work is somehow “meta-empirical” as it only looks at published studies and not on own cases. Consequently, it is based on the assumption that studies in scientific literature represent the real-world. The constructs and relationships found in the review are grouped based on their scope and summarized in a cause and effect model. The grouping of constructs results in five groups including Relationship Orientation, Relational Norm, Relational Capital, Atmosphere, and Others. Since the cause and effect model represents a directed graph, different network analysis methods may be applied for analyzing the model. In particular, an in- and out-degree analysis is applied on the cause and effect model for detecting the most influencing as well as the most influenced success factors.

Scaling relations for viscoelastic-cohesive conical indentation

Abstract Most geomaterials exhibit both viscoelastic and plastic material response when indented by a sharp conical tip. Lacking analytical solutions for viscoelastic – plastic material response, a numerical approach based on the finite element method is proposed for backcalculation of model parameters from indentation data. Departing from the analytical solutions recently obtained by Vandamme and Ulm, viscoelastic – cohesive conical indentation of a homogeneous material halfspace is dealt with in this paper. Results from finite element analysis, i. e., the load – penetration history for a rigid, conical indenter with linearly increasing load, are presented in dimensionless form. From the results, scaling relations are constructed for application to materials exhibiting viscoelastic – cohesive behavior.

Identifying Inter-organizational Key Performance Indicators from EDIFACT Messages

Inter-organizational relationships (IORs) are important for creating business potential and increasing business performance. The evaluation of IORs is necessary for analyzing the collaboration between businesses as well as for assessing business partners. However, the evaluation of IORs is ambiguous since it is usually measured by success factors, such as trust and information sharing, which are difficult to be measured quantitatively. In this paper, we propose using quantifiable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring success factors. We aim to identify KPIs in inter-organizational scenarios where information is exchanged electronically based on EDIFACT message types. In particular, we i) derive inter-organizational KPIs and propose guidelines for their calculation from EDIFACT data elements, and ii) aggregate these KPIs to define quantitative measurements reflecting inter-organizational success factors. Therefore, we first define a method for the systematic selection of suitable data elements from EDIFACT message types based on frequency analysis. Second, we consider the semantics of data elements and message types in defining KPIs. Having these KPIs at hand supports the quantitative evaluation of success factors which in turn enables the evaluation of IORs.

From Encoded EDIFACT Messages to Business Concepts Using Semantic Annotations

Standardized business documents are a prerequisite for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). One predominant standards family are the Electronic Data Interchange For Administration, Commerce and Transport (EDIFACT) formats created and maintained by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business. However, EDIFACT formats are currently specified in a textual manner where semantic relationships between data elements are neither formally nor explicitly described. While these relationships are usually easy to identify for humans, this information is hidden to machines. This hampers semantically accurate interpretation of EDIFACT messages. In addressing this shortcoming, we present an approach for conceptualizing EDIFACT messages in ontologies, the EDIonto approach. Thereby, we provide means for modeling and storing both structural information acquired from the official EDIFACT standards as well as semantic information about the relationships between data elements. Furthermore, we describe means for storing concrete EDIFACT messages in knowledge bases according to the developed ontologies. We evaluated our approach by comparing it to state-of-the-art tools for interpreting EDIFACT messages. Contrary to the other tools, the approach presented in this paper allows for the automated and semantically accurate processing of generic EDIFACT messages.

Size Matters!? Measuring the Complexity of XML Schema Mapping Models

Exchanging structured business documents is inevitable for successful collaboration in electronic commerce. A prerequisite, for fostering the interoperability between business partners utilizing different business document standards, is a mapping between different standards. However, the effort involved in creating those mappings is hard to estimate. For example, the complexity of standardized formats is one crucial aspect affecting the effort of the mapping process. Therefore, a notion of complexity is desirable for both, manual as well as automatic mapping processes. For this reason we develop an initial set of metrics, based on well established metrics for XML Schema, allowing to analyze the complexity of business document standards. Having such metrics at hand allows estimating the complexity and hence the mapping effort of a business document standard, prior to the actual mapping process. We demonstrate the complexity metrics on three different business document standards from the electronic commerce domain.

On Mapping Business Document Models to Core Components

Today, there exists a huge variety of business document models for electronic data exchange among business partners used in business-to-business, business-to-government, as well as government-to-government business transactions. Thus, it becomes inevitable to process differing document models in daily business, unless a commonly agreed standard is developed. However, even if a commonly agreed standard exists, a multitude of different document definitions will still be existent in the short-term. Incompatibilities between old document formats and the newly introduced document models are the consequence.To cope with various document models and formats we propose a heuristic approach that leverages interoperability by mapping common document models to the conceptual Core Components model introduced by UN/CEFACT. To successfully complete this mapping task we define a set of rules that may be applied to XML Schema based document models.

Feature modeling for business document models

The United Nations Centre for Trace Facilitation and eBusiness (UN/CEFACT) provides a conceptual approach named Core Components for defining business document types based on generic, reusable building blocks. For facilitating interoperability in Electronic Data Interchange, these reusable building blocks are defined in an all-embracing manner. Accordingly, business partners customize the standard business document types for fitting their needs and requirements, resulting in different business document type variants. However, the approach is missing sufficient mechanisms for managing business document model variants. First, customizing standardized business document types is purely based on a textual specification. Second, the variability present within the Core Component approach lacks an explicit representation. In this paper, we aim at making variability explicit as well as adding a formal aspect to the business document type customization process by employing variability concepts from Product Line Engineering. Furthermore, based on having explicit variability models, business partners are provided with an approach for customizing business document types through configuring variability models.

Registry support for core component evolution

The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) provides a conceptual approach, named the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS), for creating business document models. These business document models are essential for defining service interfaces of service-oriented systems and are typically stored in a registry for enabling easy storage, search, and retrieval of these artifacts. However, in such a highly dynamic environment with ever-changing market demands, business partners are confronted with the need to constantly adapt their systems. This implies revising conceptual business document models as well as adapting the corresponding service interface definitions resulting in a tedious and often error-prone task when done manually. In this paper, we present a framework for dealing with these types of evolution in service-oriented systems. Having such a framework at hand, supports business partners in coping with the evolution of business document models, as well as in adapting the corresponding service interface definitions automatically. Furthermore, we present a prototypical implementation and an evaluation of the framework proposed.