Title: Business-to-business integration and coordination costs

Authors: Juha-Miikka Nurmilaakso

Addresses: Frends Technology Oy, Vaisalantie 6, 02130 Espoo, Finland

Abstract: This paper suggests an approach for evaluation of business-to-business integration (B2Bi) and coordination costs. B2Bi benefits the business partners by reducing coordination costs. These costs result from data processing, data transmission, delays and errors. The approach relies on four coordination cost dimensions which are the frequency and complexity of the business process and the timeliness and accuracy required in the business process. The benefits of B2Bi are proposed to be higher in a more frequent or complex business process or a business process requiring higher timeliness or accuracy. The effects of these dimensions were preliminarily studied with survey data drawn from the telecommunications industry. According to Likert-scale measures, frequency, timeliness and accuracy correlated positively whereas complexity correlated negatively with the benefits of B2Bi. Based on the periodic volume, data amount, lead time and defect rate, the paper proposes technical measures of the coordination cost dimensions and evaluation steps for B2Bi.

Keywords: accuracy; business processes; frequency; complexity; coordination costs; empirical study; evaluation; technical measures; timeliness; transaction cost economics; business-to-business integration; B2Bi; B2B.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2013.054165

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2013 Vol.13 No.1, pp.1 - 20

Published online: 30 Aug 2013 *

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