Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
As eCommerce becomes more competitive and continues to expand into and merge with traditional supply-chain based businesses, a significant competitive advantage can be achieved through improved automation of the commitment process. The "chains of commitments" approach to this problem exploits the fact that a commitment from a vendor is backed up by a chain of commitments from a chain of vendors, a.k.a. the supply chain. This paper presents a high-level architecture to support this automation. It draws heavily on principles of collaborative and value chain analysis as examples, but is applicable to any commitments-based supply chain management approach.
R. Ferrell Ervin (Sat,) studied this question.