An Empirical Study of the Current State of B2B Integration in Practice

With the ongoing process of building business networks in today’s economy, business-to-business integration (B2B Integration) has become a strategic tool for utilizing and optimizing information exchange between business partners. Industry and academia have made remarkable progress in implementing and conceptualizing different kinds of electronic intercompany relationships in the last years. Nevertheless, academic findings generally focus exclusively on certain aspects of the research object, e.g. document standards, process integration or other descriptive criteria. Without a common framework these results stay unrelated and their mutual impact on each other remains largely unexplained. In this paper we explore the current state of B2B in practice. In a research project using a uniform taxonomy (eXperience methodology) we classified real-world B2B integration projects from a pool of over 400 case studies using a pre-developed framework for integration scenarios. The result of our explorative research revealed typical patterns in companies\u27 position in the supply chain and industry sector and the use of the integration scenarios