Milestone Model Based System Integration Framework for Supporting Collaboration with Enterprises

Recently small and medium enterprises have strived to collaborate with them to maintain the global trend of manufacturing environment and to satisfy various requirements of customers rapidly. To accomplish the collaboration with enterprises, a collaborative business processes should be defined at first, and the legacy systems of enterprises should be also integrated. However, the system integration brings about realistic problems such as time and cost, information sharing and security, etc. To resolve those problems, this study proposes a framework of system integration including a milestone model which manages only events and outputs of process, and a service which connects the milestone model to legacy systems. It also proposes the architecture of service handling to manage a lot of services requested from activities during executing the collaborative business process. A management scenario which describes the role of project managers and members is prepared to execute collaborative projects smoothly on the collaborative business process. To check the feasibility of the proposed framework, this study implements a prototype integration portal and develops Milestone Designer program to help process managers with modeling the enterprise milestone model easily. The prototype portal reveals that the proposed framework is valid to apply to a real value chain.