A Web services framework for automating constituent product costing operations of businesses producing and selling their own products

Stella Konstantinou, Pace University

Abstract

To-date e-commerce application development is mainly performed based on the traditional “one size fits all” preconceived boilerplate strategies and the stereotypical, formulaic “all or nothing” approaches. These approaches add many layers of complexity and require solutions to be implemented and customized to the particular needs of each individual business client. Large suppliers might gradually transition from EDI to XML and the Internet as the means of communicating information by adopting new technologies. However, the complexity and prohibitive costs of customization and multilevel integration would eventually result in a permanent exclusion of industries dominated by medium, small or micro businesses despite the opportunities they have to offer. To achieve a fully automated environment in any business (small or large) it would be necessary to divide and conquer supply chain processes by separating them into independent Web Services containing resources and delivering services targeting specific business processes. This would allow small business to choose the processes that best fit their needs and budgets. This research defines a framework, based on the Web Services architecture, for automating the costing of intermediary products (sub-assemblies) produced by final product producers. This framework, exemplified for small restaurants, includes a hardware independent architecture and a standards-based language (structures of information) to support the development of tools. These tools would facilitate the automatic product costing functions and processes, including the gathering and organizing of information, for any particular business but in such a way that it will work for small business clients. The framework design considers existing B2B standards pertaining to e-catalog products and XML-based solutions (e.g., product classification and price models). In addition to the architecture and its relationship to external and internal product costing business client processes, this framework encompasses a data architecture that defines the specification of the structures of information and the design of information flows that would enable affordable and reliable integration of data residing in databases or XML based documents with networked and internet based Web Services. This specification, which is developed based on existing, converged, modified, extended and added language elements, would be used to define a unified XML schema language to support the framework's information structures.

Subject Area

Computer science|Operations research

Recommended Citation

Konstantinou, Stella, "A Web services framework for automating constituent product costing operations of businesses producing and selling their own products" (2004). ETD Collection for Pace University. AAI3140276.
https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/dissertations/AAI3140276

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