4.2 Common Business Processes

The Core Components and Business Process Analysis Team worked in the evaluation of common Business Processes. To categorise the different Business Processes the Porter Value Chain is taken as a categorisation schema. Figure 12 shows the value chain after Michael E. Porter.

Figure 12: Graphical representation of the Porter Value Chain (Adapted from the ebXML Catalogue of Common Business Processes)

Even if this Porter Value Chain is dated back to 1980, common categories like human resources, customer service, procurement, manufacturing, financing, sales can be found and parallels to electronic business in general as introduced in chapter 2.1 are obvious.

The ebXML Catalogue of Common Business Processes v1.0 [8] lists around 200 common business processes in the following categorisations: Procurement Management, Administration, Product Introduction, Financial, Transportation and Logistics, Marketing Management, Product Development, Product Planning and Service Support. As input for the list several standards were taken into account: EDIFACT, X.12, RosettaNet Partner Interface Protocol, CII, OAG BOD's, xCBL and probably more.