Factories at GE Lighting division used to send

Factories at GE Lighting division used to send hundreds of Requisitions For Quotations (RFQs) to the corporate sourcing department each day for lowvalue machine parts. For each requisition, the accompanying blueprints had to be requested from storage, retrieved from the vault, transported to the processing site, photocopied, folded, attached to paper requisition forms with quote sheets, stuffed into envelopes and mailed out. This process took at least 7 days and was so complex and timeconsuming that the sourcing department normally sent out bid packages only to two or three suppliers at a time.

Upstream Internal Cereal Grain Downstream Packaged Cereal Paperboard Word Labels

Business Customers Consumers Supplier’s Electronic Mall B 2 C E-commerce B 2 B E-Commerce

Business Suppliers Buyer’s Electronic Mall

Business Suppliers Business Customers Intermediary’s Electronic Mall

Buyer Supplier RFQ Response to RFQ Purchase Order P. O. Acknowledgement Purchase Order Change

Message Manager Message Base Directory Consulting Directory Individual Manager Message Queue Mgt. Message Gate An Architecture of Intelligent Agents for Electronic Commerce: UNIK-AGENT Approach

Customers need to visit many malls Meta-Mall architecture is need for the customers to reduce the effort of visiting many sites Every mall requires a proprietary shopping bag and digital wallet Standard shopping bag and digital wallet that can work independently of malls are necessary Software agents merely help the search process Comparison-shopping needs to be treated as multiple criteria decision support Customer membership registration is requested for each mall Shared customer membership is necessary to allow the comparison of multiple malls with a single registration

Inventory availability is not displayed Dynamic inventory availability should be displayed to customers Precise delivery date is less critical Precise delivery date should be dynamically confirmed at ordering time Ordering system is fragmented from inventory system Integration of orders with inventory, production scheduling, and delivery scheduling systems essential

Human interactively involved in the buying decision Buyer’s and seller’s software agents assist communication to minimize human’s involvement Software agent in one site cannot understand the norm of the counterpart agents Mutually agreed contract type conformation is necessary to effectuate the communication between agents Seller agents assist the configuration process based on the buyer’s requirement specification Buyers have to search around the seller’s products catalog configuring manually Seller’s data mining is popular Buyer’s data mining is additionally necessary