TrustCoM

Many large European companies now use ERP systems to manage not only their finances but also their relations with both the customers and suppliers. Electronic marketplaces are developing for the provision of goods and services by small and large companies. The rise of SOA using the technology of Web Services and the Grid provide a standard set of ICT tools that will open up these technologies to competitive and interoperating provision at the ICT level, and open competition between suppliers and consumers throughout business value chains. These open electronic marketplaces will support not only the establishment of long-term joint ventures and business partnerships along supply chains, but also more dynamic virtual organisations between SMEs and large corporations. This allows flexibly creating supply and valuing chains that recruit the required resources to quickly respond to market opportunities ahead of competition that does not have such infrastructure. In order to automate supply chain management to take advantage of dynamic business opportunities it is necessary to mitigate the business risks to which all parties are exposed by providing:

• supplier qualification information as a basis for selecting suppliers or business partners;

• documented and transparent contractual relationships that define what all parties in the chain should do;

• a secure infrastructure that both provides all required access to information and services between business partners, but also ensures that access is limited only to that required for the contracted business;

• monitor the dynamic operation of the business processes in the value chain against those contracts to identify any failure as soon as they occur to meet obligations;

• implement contractual terms and conditions as policies within the SOA infrastructure to act on such events to modify or reconfigure the interoperation of the organisations in the value chain in order to overcome problems.