e-Marketplace composite pattern: Select Application pattern

An e-Marketplace serves as a hub that brings together buyers and sellers. Marketplaces can provide a unified view of the goods and services traded in the market and a variety of mechanisms to help buyers and sellers trade these products.

Implementing a successful e-Marketplace requires that you identify an appropriate Application pattern to meet the requirements of buyers and sellers using the solution.

An Application pattern is a high-level view of the principal layout of the application. It does not show middleware, files, or databases, and it does not describe the detailed application design.

Just as an e-Marketplace is built up from e-commerce, user service, and application integration building blocks, the e-Marketplace composite pattern is built from a combination of business patterns corresponding to these building blocks, as discussed earlier. The Business patterns that serve as component patterns in the e-Marketplace composite pattern, are as follows:

• Self-Service
• Information Aggregation
• Collaboration
• Extended Enterprise
• Application Integration
• Access Integration

Depending on the type of e-Marketplace being deployed (a trading exchange, buy side hub or sell side hub), different component patterns are combined to implement these various functionalities.

Note

Note that only the names of the component Application patterns below have been updated to reflect new information published in the IBM Press book, Patterns for e-business: A Strategy for Reuse. The listing of component Application patterns that, combined, create various e-Marketplace implementations, have not been updated from information available prior to the book's publishing. For example, the "Component Application patterns 1, Electronic Commerce" pattern listed below as a component of the basic e-Marketplace design is no longer listed as such in Patterns for e-business: A Strategy for Reuse (refer to list above). Subscribe to the Patterns for e-business Mailing List to be informed when this information is updated.

Component Application pattern 1: Electronic Commerce

The Electronic Commerce pattern, as applied to the e-Marketplace composite pattern, embodies the commerce interaction undertaken by a purchaser in the e-Marketplace. A marketplace contains interactions, such as RPQ/RFP and exchange trading, (addressed in more detail later) that go beyond what is typically encountered in a B2C online buying scenario. The "Application 1" node in the diagram below handles the matching and selling functions of the marketplace.

Component Application pattern 2: Self-Service

The Self-Service pattern addresses non purchasing interactions with the marketplace, such as a supplier checking order statistics and providing catalog updates. "Application 2" is a content creation application or an application to provide supporting services, such as performing RFP/RFQ processing or accessing purchase orders.

Component Application pattern 3: Collaboration

The Collaboration pattern comes into play in approval workflow, in which an approver must sign off on a purchase before it is submitted to the supplier. "Application 3" is a workflow application for implementing such flows.

The next two component Application patterns specify the program-to-program interactions between a supplier and the marketplace or an automated purchaser and the marketplace.

Component Application pattern 4: Batch data exchange

This component of an e-Marketplace solution design does not correspond to one of the high-level Business patterns. Rather, it functions as a batch data exchange, such as the programmatic import of catalog information into the aggregate catalog of the e-Marketplace. This is a bulk transfer of information, as opposed to an automated data exchange using a managed Business-to-Business protocol (an Extended Enterprise functionality - see Component Application pattern 5). "Application 4" provides aggregation and publishing of the catalog in the marketplace. It is not necessarily the same as the application that manages the catalog. "Application 6" is a catalog content application provided by a supplier. It lets you create and extract content, potentially driven by business rules, and transmit this content to the marketplace.

Component Application pattern 5: Extended Enterprise::Managed Public and Private Processes

Component Application pattern 5 defines the interaction between the e-Marketplace and the supplier's commerce system, as well as that between the buyer's procurement system and the commerce functions of the e-Marketplace where this interaction is governed by a well defined and executable contract. The "Application 1" node in this design is the same "Application 1" in Component Application pattern 1. When the commerce functions of the e-Marketplace integrate with automated buyer or supplier systems, this pattern is applied. Other applications in the marketplace might also need to interact with partner applications (for example, "Application 5").

In addition, the following patterns, are related to the design of an e-Marketplace:

• Application Integration - for the integration of supporting systems and business process within the market maker's internal network
• Collaboration - for sophisticated community support beyond the approval flow used in a purchasing transaction. Community support includes user collaboration facilities, such as discussion forums, that augment the core commerce functions of the marketplace.
• Information Aggregation - for support of business intelligence by the marketplace and suppliers.

A full e-Marketplace design contains all of the Component pieces listed above. However, an e-Marketplace can be deployed incrementally, with various elements of the full e-Marketplace functionality added one at a time. The following e-Marketplace subsets describe different deployment phases of the full e-Marketplace solution design at increasing levels of complexity, functionality, and integration.

Note

Note that the graphics below have not been updated with current Business pattern names as found in Patterns for e-business: A Strategy for Reuse. For a listing of the new Business pattern names, review the Patterns Web site Timeline.

An e-Marketplace involves many types of interactions with buyers and sellers. Some of these can be user-driven and others can be carried out programmatically. The degree of programmatic integration of buyers and sellers into the e-Marketplace is a feature that can be used to classify subsets of the full solution design defined above. These subsets can represent a phased approach to implementing the e-Marketplace or as a means to address specific requirements for B2B commerce.

Subset 1: Web-integrated e-Marketplace

This first class of e-Marketplace performs all buyer and seller tasks using a Web browser to log onto the marketplace site and conduct business interactively. The activities supported by such an implementation include

• Registration of organizations and users for both buyers and suppliers
• Catalog maintenance
• Product selection by buyers
• Negotiation without automated inventory checking
• Creating and submitting purchase orders
• Notification of sellers of activity though e-mail
• Sellers obtaining purchase orders through browser sessions
• Sellers updating the status of an order in the marketplace
• Buyer reviews of status of purchase orders (could include confirmations, building or shipping schedules, delivery schedules, and package identifications)

These activities may include approval processes, but do not include payment processes.

These commerce capabilities correspond to an initial or first phase implementation of an e-Marketplace and are a good basis upon which to add automated integration with buyers and sellers. Referring to the initial picture of an e-Marketplace, Subset 1 would look like the following figure.

Subset 1 is built from Component Application patterns 1 through 3 and developed primarily around the Electronic Commerce composite pattern.

Subset 2: e-Marketplace with Automated Supplier Integration

The second class builds on the first by adding programmatic integration with suppliers. This is an Extended Enterprise capability added to the Web-based features of Subset 1. Essentially helping speed the supplier processes, it augments Subset 1 with the following:

• Automatic response to RFQ (in cases where this is possible)
• Real-time inventory check/availability to promise
• Automatic order transmission
• Automatic order status changes
• Automatic catalog maintenance (Distributed catalog)
• Excludes payment processes

This subset fills in more of the e-Marketplace picture as shown in the following figure.

Subset 2 is built from Component Application patterns 1 through 5. It essentially adds B2B process integration to the Electronic Commerce foundation in the previous subset. This can be a second evolution of the e-Marketplace. In the first subset, buyers and suppliers had no application development or middleware requirements to join the e-Marketplace. They needed only Web browser access to the Internet. Subset 2 suppliers that want to participate in an automated fashion in the e-Marketplace must support a B2B protocol with application development and additional middleware.

Subset 3: Fully Integrated Marketplace

Here, the automated access to the e-Marketplace is provided to both buyers and sellers. This allows procurement systems to interact directly with the e-Marketplace. This puts an application development and middleware requirement on buyers that want to take advantage of this automated buying feature. The list of additional capability provided by this subset includes:

• Automatic RFQ placement
• Notification of buyer of responses to RFQ
• Automatic order placement
• Automatic registration of new buyers to the e-Marketplace
• Excludes payment processes

This figure shows a snapshot of the full e-Marketplace picture.

Full e-Marketplace

To complete the picture of an e-Marketplace, the marketplace provider must add to subset 3 the support of payment processes and the integration of internal businesses with the commerce functions provided to the marketplace members. This implies the addition of the Application Integration pattern. By applying Collaboration business pattern functionality to support online community features, you can provide more sophisticated supplementary services to e-Marketplace members.

The previous information and graphics have not been updated with the most recent advancements in Patterns for e-business evolution. eMarketplaces are particularly complex Web-based applications. As such, they require extensive analysis and synthesis of relevant industry advances to keep current.

The Patterns for e-businss project is undergoing such analysis. The first product of these efforts is a major update of the eMarketplace Sell-Side Hub solution specifically. This information is largely derived from the recently published IBM Redbook B2B e-commerce with WebSphere Commerce Business Edition V5.4, Patterns for e-business Series. This Redbook follows an imaginary customer with realistic e-business and IT requirements through the project development life cycle. As it turns out, the needs of this imaginary customer match the functionality provided by the eMarketplace Sell-Side Hub pattern.

To access the Sell-Side Hub solution design, please review the Sell-Side Hub application pattern path. The design data found there is limited to the scope of information normally presented on this Web site. For a thorough treatment of the issues and processes that accompany a full-scale implementation of the Sell-Side Hub pattern, please review B2B e-commerce with WebSphere Commerce Business Edition V5.4, Patterns for e-business Series.

To continue with the General eMarketplace pattern path, next review the e-Marketplace runtime pattern.