本科生毕业设计(论文)

外文资料原文

A Web-based and Email Driven Electronic Contract Management

System

Thomas Kwok, Thao Nguyen, Linh Lam and Trieu Chieu

IBM Research Division

Thomas J. Watson Research Center

19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532

***********.com1. Introduction

Contracts are required in most transactions of the enterprise business,

as they constitute the binding relationship between an enterprise and its

suppliers, business partners, or customers. In many enterprises, the

majority of their revenues are contract driven. At the same, a significant

part of their expenses is also contract related. Automation of some

contract management tasks in the electronic contract lifecycle presents a

substantial value creation opportunity for the enterprise. This value stems

from improved productivity and security, effectively aggregated contract

information, accelerated contract transaction time and lifecycle processes,

reduced contractual errors and risk, enabled revenue forecast and profit

optimization, as well as better compliance enforcement.

With the advent of Internet technology and electronic commerce,

there are growing research activities and implementation efforts on

establishing and standardizing an electronic contract management system. 本科生毕业设计(论文)

Currently, the International Association of Contract and Commercial

Managers have listed over twenty commercial available software

products for electronic contract management. Most research activities on

the electronic contract reported are focus on electronic contract creation

or representation language, management, negotiation and collaboration,

execution, performance, security and signing, fulfillment and data mining.

However, there is no study or product focus on a Web-based electronic

contract management system that can support both internal and

intra-enterprises workflows, or with multi-tenants hosting capability.

There are some discussions in addressing the need to execute electronic

contracts in a speedy way but there is no good method proposed. In

addition, there is no good disclosed method to automate the watermarking

of signature information on the signed electronic contracts although there

are several automated electronic contract creation and process methods

reported.

In this paper, we present a Web-based and email driven electronic

contract management system that supports both internal and

intra-enterprises workflows, and with multi-tenants hosting capability.

This system sends out email notifications to request those users who are

required to act on certain tasks to process their electronic contracts to act

on their tasks immediately at every internal business process and

document flow step within every workflow. For sequential tasks, this

system also sends out email notifications to those users in line to act on

the next task to process their electronic contracts to alert and remind them

to take actions when other users have just completed the previous tasks.

Thus, this system enables the electronic contract users to accelerate the

transaction time and life cycle of their electronic contracts. We also

describe several novel methods to automate some manual and tedious

tasks, such as watermarking signature information on the signed

electronic contract and life cycle management, in this paper. 本科生毕业设计(论文)

2. The framework

Figure 1 shows an architectural framework of an email driven

electronic contract management system. This electronic contract

management system is Web-based and supports both internal and

intra-enterprises workflows. It also has a capability of hosting

multi-tenants at the same time using the same set of computing servers.

The framework consists of a Web server, a DB2 server and an application

server. The Web server dynamically creates, composes and delivers

customized Web pages with inputs and interactions from contract

administrators and representatives in an enterprise, as well as their

counter parts in their suppliers, business partners, and their customers

through either HTTP or HTTPS communications. The DB2 server hosts

the database for the electronic contract metadata and the repository for all

electronic contracts and their related documents. Each enterprise or tenant

has its own set of database. A service provider, such as IBM, can use or

host this electronic contract management system as common computing

services to a number of enterprises to manage their electronic contracts at

the same time using the same set of computing servers to minimize the

cost and simplify the system integrations.