Internet-based Procurement Process for Marine Service

해운대리점의 인터넷 구매/조달 프로세스 구축

E-commerce has not only brought about a great change in the way we exchange goods and services but also revolutionized the way we handle business transactions. In addition, it has a significant influence upon the present business structure, and most of firms in service industry as well as manufacturing are considering adopting E-commerce in a serious manner. Most vessels purchase merchandises through a number of shipping agents. As the amount of harbor materials increase, the number of vessels and their navigation frequency also increase. As a result, the amount of procurement for ships has increased. Traditional means such as telephone and fax to handle ever-increasing harbor transaction, however, has proved to be very time-consuming and cost ineffective. Therefore, people are starting to look for more effective ways. In this paper, an internet-based scheme of B2B transaction is proposed to handle procurement problem between shipping agency and shipping company, and between vessel and suppliers as a more effective approach to streamline such problems. We extract problems of shipping agency through task-analysis and present a scheme that performs decision making and procurement as a system agent with brokering structure. Purchaser and supplier are offered material information rapidly and task loads are minimized by the scheme. Also, the system can support decision making of purchasing goods, and information is shared among purchaser, supplier and system through the system interface.