Introduction

Automating Tendering Processes with Web Services: A Case Study on Building Construction Tendering in Hong Kong

Introduction • Tendering processes involves lots of business procedures • Internal integration: communicate with other systems such as supply, order, purchase, procurement, account, … • External integration: need a framework for all stakeholders to follow to enable application-to-application communication over Internet • Current manual or only semi-automated • Involves both humans (esp. decision) and systems • Important for • enterprises and government • suppliers

Case Study in Building Construction • Problems of tendering done by hand • late submission of the tender booklet • calculation errors by hand / spreadsheet • Benefits of automatic e-tendering • tenderer • make final decision of the price in almost the last minutes • update price of the material from ERP and external sources • Client • easy generation of the tender report after electronic submission • Benefits of web-services • Different tenderer may have different database and system • need to use an open standard for the data exchange

Typical e-tendering system

Typical tendering process for building construction

Tendering Business Processes

Request to Participate (RTP)

Invitation to Tender (ITT)

Tender Submission (TS)

Tender Award Notification (TAN)

System Architecture The pricing system can use e-Negotiation approach or traditional method

Data Flow Overview Database Tender-in Supplier Tenderer Call quotation Sub-contractor Client Subcontract … Tenderer Tender-out Sub-contractor … Tenderer Supplier … Price information …

Data Conceptual Model

Web Service Implementation Overview

SOAP Message Embedded in HTTP Request

SOAP Message Embedded in HTTP Response

Example Decision Metrics

Example Weighted Average Score

Example Ranking

Exception Handling Web Services • Tender Addendum • Consistency of the tender document • Bulk discount • Additional information provided by tenderer • Withdraw of tender

Summary • Digitalization of the tender document • Process and data integration • Timely actions • Reduced human effort • Web service based architecture with the SOAP messages exchange during tendering processes • Typical example application scenario and data model • Establish cross-organizational collaboration via existing Internet standards • supporting both human Web-based and application programmatic interactions • smaller business partners with varies degree of automation • event passing with the publish-and-subscribe paradigm • facilitate exception handling

Future Work • Further integration studies • internal integration of tendering processes with ERP / DSS • external integration with e-marketplaces and brokers • sub-contracting • Similar integration work can be done for other related business processes in enterprises • Managing the complexity of Web service composition • Further development methodologies • Monitoring and alerts • Further decision models

Question and Answer Thank you! Contact: Patrick.Hung@uoit.ca, dicksonchiu@ieee.org

Introduction

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