Support for B2B e-Contracting - The Process Perspective

In business-to-business relations, contracts serve both as a protection mechanism of trading partners, as well as a prescription document for activities to be executed by the parties. The processes of contract establishment and its enactment are often expensive and time consuming. E-contracting aims at automation of these processes, making them faster and cheaper. For the design of an information system for support of e-contracting, a clear vision of the e-contracting processes is required. In this paper, we introduce a process model for flexible business-to-business e-contracting. To separate concerns, we distinguish structured function and communication perspectives of econtracting processes complemented with consistency rules. The proposed approach allows achieving completeness and consistency in building complex contracting processes.