Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems, International Conference on
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Abstract

In many cases, deviations between actual product and service demands and their forecasts are inevitable, creating an excess of products and service. To deal with that excess, it is important that logistics professionals elaborate strategies for discovering potential and repressed demands. Traditional techniques to manage inventories do not suffice to reach all expected results. In this context, strategies for products and service excess destination are also promoted, in order to optimize application of organizational resources. Negotiation between the party holding excess and the potentially demanding party is a crucial issue in the excess destination activity. This is a process in which two distinct parties search for a consensus regarding their interests and objectives, trying to satisfy both expectations. Thus, it is fundamental to establish mechanisms that stimulate communication and motivation during the negotiation process, as well as the ability for decision-making, conflict management and reaching an agreement. Therefore, cooperation may be the best type of negotiation. Cooperation will help to establish points in common that favor the negotiation, and information sharing and consensus building plays a key role in this process. In this work, we present a system to support cooperative negotiations aiming at leveling inventory of products and services used by different processes, stimulating the integration among them. The system will be used by several Agencies within Brazilian Federal Government Defense Ministry, acting as a market for excess capacity of services and goods. The proposed environment will facilitate system users to cooperate towards achieving common objectives in the negotiation.

1.   Introduction

Inventories influence companies' profitability to a large degree because they absorb significant investments. For that reason, careful inventory management motivates the interest of logistics professionals to elaborate strategies promoting a balance between management costs and maintenance of a desired level of customer service [3],[8]. In many cases, traditional management techniques are not enough to reach this objective, creating excesses of products and services. Therefore, one of the options is to define strategies for the destination of excesses in order to optimize the organizations' resource applications.

An important aspect to be considered whenever attempt is made for the application of the products or services excess is the negotiation between the interested parties: one responsible for the demand and other responsible for the supply. The negotiation is a process in which distinctive parties try to achieve a consensus between their objectives and interests in order to satisfy their expectations and reach a compromise [7],[29],[33]. Therefore, it is really important to establish mechanisms to promote the communication and motivation during the negotiation process as well as for the ability to make decisions, administrate conflicts, overcome disagreements and reach a deal [23].

This research was motivated by an actual problem presented by the Brazilian Ministry of Defense, in which the Agencies need a system to manage information about the excess and demand of products and the capacity of existent services, support the negotiation process between the supplying and demanding Agencies, as well as record the negotiation details.

The objective of this paper is to propose a WEB computerized environment that supports the bilateral negotiation process between parts of a supply chain, where one part is responsible for the demand and the other part is responsible for the supply of products and capacity of services in excess. The main challenge of this work is to propose an environment that stimulates the cooperation between parts, thus facilitating the integration and coordination between them.

For this, in this environment, the negotiation among users is organized in a well-structured process that is defined based on negotiation steps found in the literature. Moreover, this environment allows easy access from the Web, real-time communication and closer interaction among users. The main idea is to apply the concepts and tools of Computer Supported Cooperative Work to the building of this negotiation process support environment.

The study can be analyzed under two points of view: the logistics point of view and the technological point of view. From the logistics point of view, the elaboration of a cooperative environment to support the decision making and the communication in the negotiation process takes on great importance because of the great difficulty in establishing efficient mechanisms of integration and sharing of information among process pertaining to a same supply chain [17],[18],[32],[36],[21]. Those difficulties can be reduced through the cooperative environment proposed. From the technological point of view, the proposed computing environment represents a challenge, as it involves the integration of distinct research areas: CSCW [6],[14],[22],[28],[30] Negotiation Systems Support (NSS) [9],[11],[16],[25] Electronic Supply Chain Design (e-SCD) [17],[18].

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses some considerations about the inventory and the reasons that can lead to an excess of products and services despite the good management of that inventory. It is important to emphasize that is not the intention of this work to present a detailed research into inventory management. Still in this section, some formal aspects of the negotiation process; a brief view of the Negotiation Systems Support and CSCW will be presented. Section 3 presents a concise description of the actual case which motivated this work and the proposed system. Finally, in section 4, the conclusion of the work is presented.

2.   Formal Aspects of the Problem

2.1 Logistics Domain

The two basic functions of the inventory are providing the production and maintaining sales. The objective of the first function is to guarantee uninterrupted production, eliminating the risks of stoppage on account of supply problems, and enhancing the efficiency of the productive process. The second function of the inventory is meeting the floating demand and, as a result, enhancing the customers' service level, as the customers can be immediately supplied with products and services [3],[4],[21]. For the organizations, this feature means competitive advantage, avoiding lost sales or even increasing the sales level.

There are some situations in which it is possible to create exceeding inventory without this being a management mistake. The nature of the demand influences inventory management directly. For example, a great number of products and services have seasonal demand, as in case of the Christmas and Easter-related products, following these periods, the above mentioned products and services can remain in inventory for long time. Another feature that can influence the inventory is the irregular, or erratic, pattern of the demand of some products. An example of this behavior can be seen in Ballou [3].

In inventory management, the “life cycle” of a product should be considered in addition to the demand characteristics. The life of a product, based on the logistics point of view, does not end with its delivery to the customer. Products may become obsolete, damaged, or simply do not work, so they may be returned to their origin to be disposed of, repaired or recycled. The management of the product reverse flow is called Reverse Logistic [31]. Once back to the warehouse, depending on their condition, recycling can be managed as excess destination.

Considering the facts presented, it is extremely necessary to establish strategies to recycle the excess inventory, either through the reuse of the stock within the sector of the company itself or through the negotiation of those excess products and services with other sectors or other companies representing compatible demand with the supply created.

The proposal of this work is to support the negotiation between the users responsible for the supply and demand of products and services in order to obtain an accurate inventory level. Accurate inventory level should be understood, within the context of this research, as the sufficient inventory quantity of supplies and raw materials to guarantee uninterrupted production and final products to ensure the level of service offered, without excesses.

The companies (or sectors of the same company) involved in the system present a lack of balance in their inventory levels. Therefore, the system should act as a tool to promote the balance between those companies in order to enable attaining the respective accurate inventory levels. Figure 1 represents this vision of the system:

The computational environment proposed can be considered as an integration tool between these companies (sectors), the challenge being the customatization of this process. Customization is a critical success factor in current business environment. One of the most important components that render fast and inexpensive customization possible is electronic supply chain design (e-SCD). e-SCD is a supply chain design which integrates and coordinates suppliers, manufacturers, logistics channels, and customers, using information technology (IT) [17],[18]. According to Pine [26], customization can not be achieved at individual firm level. Every company in a large supply chain or distribution chain is dependent on the other. Moreover, cooperation between companies is necessary for a successful supply chain. Graphic: SYSTOC vision as a tool for attaining accurate inventory levels

Figure 1.Figure 1.

The processes involved in the system represent demand and supply of compatible products and/or service and are part of a supply chain. The proposed system integrates those processes through information exchange among them, allowing for stock reduction at one point of the chain and for meeting demand in another point. Hence, the system can be seen as a step towards supply chain integration and consequently, in e-SCD direction. In this section, some issues of the inventory management were presented that motivate the elaboration of the system proposed in this study. More details on the inventory management can be found in [3],[4],[8].

2.2 Negotiation domain

Negotiation is present in several relationships in the organizations – between managers, employees, suppliers, and customers: all these relationships require constant negotiation. Sometimes the negotiator is skill is responsible for the difference between profits and losses in a project. This is the reason why negotiation is of great importance for company development.

According to Lomuscio et al [1], negotiation can be defined as: “Process by which group of agents communicate with one another to try and come to a mutually-acceptable agreement on some matter”. In this definition, the accent falls on words as ‘agent’, ‘communicate’, and ‘mutually acceptable'. The parties taking part in the negotiation process are not necessarily people, but can be any type of actor, such as software agents. These actors communicate according to a negotiation protocol and act as according to a strategy. The protocol determines the flow of messages between the negotiating parties and acts as the rules by which the negotiating parties must abide by if they are to interact. The protocol is public and open. The strategy, on the other hand, is the way in which a given party acts within those rules, in an effort to get the best outcome of the negotiation. The strategy of each participant is therefore private [5],[37].

Some dilemmas in the definition of the strategies, can be found such as cooperation or competition; truth or lie; short term or long term. The answer for those dilemmas defines the type of the negotiation. Traditionally, two types of negotiation exist: competitive and cooperative [2],[23],[27].

Competitive negotiation (also known as Zero-sum in the context of the Game Theory and Operational Research) is classified like Win/Lose. The negotiator with the posture Win/Lose chooses the competition, the lie and the short time. This way, the fulfillment of the wishes of one party may be directly detrimental to the fulfillment of the wishes of another party. The cooperative negotiation (also known as collaborative negotiation) is classified as Win/Win. It is a cooperative process in which involved parties find alternatives of common earnings, that is, which cater to the interests of all the parties [2],[23],[27].

An interesting vision of the negotiation process is given by Huang and Mao [25]. In this work, the authors state that negotiation is a process involving a group of entities linked. Figure 2 represents the authors' vision. Entities are represented by rectangles and relationships by arrows.

According to the authors, a negotiation includes a group of tasks, such as problem definition, alternative generation, alternative evaluation, modelling preference and consensus building, orchestrated by a set of events and executed by the parties involved in the negotiation. On the other hand, a negotiation involves a set of issues, and every issue contains a set of alternatives. Furthermore, the set of issues may also be constrained by a set of criteria. Each involved party has a group of strategies for generating its set of preferences on the issues and alternatives. Each party has a set of preferences with respect to what alternatives are taken on each and how important these matters are. Graphic: Relationships between Negotiation Entities [25]

Figure 2.Figure 2.

As with every process, negotiation can be divided in phases. In Graham and Mintu [15], the authors suggest three sequential phases in studying business negotiations: an antecedent phase, a concurrent phase, and a consequent phase. In Kersten and Noronha [10], the authors state that three phases roughly correspond to three phases of the negotiation: pre-negotiation, conduct of negotiation and post-settlement.

In the pre-negotiation phase, the objective is the understanding of the negotiation problem. This phase involves the analysis of the situation, problem, opponent, issues, alternatives, preference, reservation levels and strategy. Moreover, in this phase, negotiators plan the agenda of the negotiations and develop their BATNA. BATNA is acronym to “Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement”, having been created by Roger Fisher and Willian Ury [7]. More details on the BATNA can be found in [7],[24],[29]. The second phase the negotiation, Conduct of negotiation, involves exchanges of messages, offers and counteroffers based on different strategies and the kinds of negotiation. The post-settlement analysis phase involves only the evaluation of the negotiation outcomes generated, and after wards, the negotiation activity. These outcomes include the information about the compromise and the negotiators' satisfaction.

In the actual organizations operating in a dynamic market, and which are geographically distributed, in order to account for decisions in group with the participation from all parts, the negotiation has to be made faster and in a cooperative way, no matter the negotiators' location nor the kind of negotiation adopted. Thus, technology becomes extremely important to meet the need for processing and managing data and information related to each situation, so they can make the right decision according to organization's objectives. Therefore, it is necessary to develop applications providing support to the negotiation process by promoting the best information management through appropriate resources, such as the Internet, for instance.

The E-Negotiation appears in this context. E-negotiations are negotiation processes that are fully or partially conducted with the use of electronic media (EM), which use digital channels to transport data. EM may support simple communication acts between the participants (e.g., email, chat) or provide tools allowing for complex, multimedia interactions (e.g., e-markets, electronic tables) [11],[20]. According to Huang and Mao [25], e-Negotiation has the following five salient properties (5 Is): Interactive, Informative, Irregular, Integral and Inexpensive.

The consideration of a medium as a space (physical or virtual) where the negotiation is being conducted and the agents who interact in this space allows distinguishing between three categories of information systems used in e-negotiations: Negotiation support tools, such as DSS and NSS, assist a decision maker with communication or decision tasks in a negotiation process; Negotiation software agents (NSA) replace human negotiators in all their decision-making, communication and other negotiating activities; E-negotiation media are information systems comprising electronic channels that process and transport data among the participants involved in a negotiation and provide a platform where transactions are coordinated through agent interaction. They implement the rules of communication in a negotiation protocol.

The basic difference between these systems is on the level of negotiation automation of the decision-making process [37]. The parties engaged in the negotiation exchange information in order to express their expectations towards the agreement. Based on the information received and on their initial goals, parties make decisions on how to continue the negotiation process.

In general, decision-making could be performed in three ways. The first way is when the decisions are made by people. The second one is when the final decision is made by people, but the support or the options are given by a computer system. These computer systems are so called Negotiation Support Systems (NSS). The last way is when the decisions are taken without human interference, that is, fully automatically. The commonly-used term for this kind of negotiation automated negotiation [5],[37].

2.3 Negotiation Support Systems

Negotiation support systems (NSS) refer to a specialized class of group support systems designed to help negotiators achieve optimal settlements. They were typically used for training and research in a laboratory environment, but rarely used in practice. Commercial NSS packages, as well as empirical evidence on NSS usefulness, however, do exist. Yet, practical usage of NSS in organizations has been minimal [9],[11],[25],[34],[35]. This fact is what prompted some researchers to study the intention of adopting NSS. In [16], the authors explore factors affecting business managers and the executive's intention to adopt NSS.

In the [35], the authors affirm that NSS can be classified into two categories: solution-driven NSS and process support NSS. A solution-driven NSS provides solution alternatives or suggests possible agreements to the negotiating parties. A process-support NSS does not provide any suggested solutions. It is designed to support the negotiation process, from the preparation stage to the contract signing stage. A process support NSS addresses two dimensions that a solution-driven NSS does not: enriched communication channels and cooperative work.

Internet technologies and the Web allowed for a new generation of NSS, denominated Web-based negotiation support system-WNSS. In the following paragraphs, some examples of NSS are presented.

INSPIRE (InterNeg Support Program for Intercultural Research) [910] is a Web-based NSS used for research and training in intercultural and intracultural negotiations. INSPIRE can conduct negotiation anonymously, evaluate the appropriateness of an offer, and review the history of a negotiation. INSPIRE supports the tasks of preference assessment, alternative offer analysis, offer exchange, counter-offer evaluation, and compromise efficiency assessment using the Pareto-optimality approach. Although INSPIRE supports the communication among negotiators by exchanging messages, it does not deal with the interactions among different entities in negotiation activities.

WebNS is another example of a WNSS [34],[35] used for research and training. It focuses on process support, in particular on structuring of text-based exchanges and automatic process documentation. The WebNS system supports the specification of, issues and their discussion. The experiments with these two systems show the potential of WNSS in teaching, self-learning and research. They also show the potential of analytical methods for the preparation and conduct of e-negotiations; 75% of almost 5,000 Inspire users stated that they would use a system like Inspire in real-life negotiations and 85% would use such a system to prepare themselves to conduct actual negotiations [12].

CyberSettle(www.cybersettle.com). LiveExchange (www.moai.com), EcommBuilder(www.ozro.com), SmartSettle(www.smatsettle.com) are commercial NSS. More information on those systems can be found in [11].

2.4 Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

CSCW stands for Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and may be defined as the research discipline for the techniques and methodologies to support group work. In this section, some important definitions of CSCW will be introduced. However, it is not in the scope of this work to review the CSCW area. More details on the CSCW area can be found in [6],[14],[22],[28],[30].

The word ‘groupware’ was firstly used by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz in 1982, but was adopted by the CSCW community to define the technologies that attempt to implement CSCW systems [14]. Thus, while CSCW is used to determine the research in the group work area and how the computers may support it, groupware has been used to determine the technology (hardware and/or software) created by the research in CSCW [28].

For Ellis et. al. [6], the objective of groupware is to give assistance to groups in communication, cooperation and coordination of their activities. Those authors define groupware as “computer systems that assist groups of people involved in one task or common purpose through an interface to a shared environment”.

According to Baecker [28], CSCW and groupware represent a change of paradigms in the computer science, because what is detached is the coordination, communication and solutions to problems between human-human instead of human-machine. Baecker also mentions Lynch, Snyder and Vogel (1990) to make a distinction between common software and groupware software: “…groupware makes the user aware that he is part of a group, while most other software seeks to hide and protect the users from each other…” Alternatively, Borges [22] considers that the systems that promote communication among the members of a group work, as the electronic mail, are groupware systems, because they contribute to a bigger result than the total of individual contributions.

Therefore, tools to support cooperative work include communication mechanisms that allow people to see, listen and send messages to each other; sharing mechanisms that allow people to work in the same work space at the same time or at different moments; and information-sharing mechanisms that allow for the work of several people on the same information base. In the next section, some CSCW tools used in this work are presented.

3.   SYSTOC: a Cooperative System to Support Inventory Leveling Negotiation

The motivation to this research came through a real case presented by the Brazilian Ministry Defense (MD). The Agencies wish to offer to other Agencies or departments, products and services they have in excess, avoiding losses and resource wasting. On trying to solve the problem, the MD required the drawing up of a plan for the development of a computer environment on the WEB capable of enabling possible the negotiation of products and services. The system should present an interface allowing to the users to register their supplies and/or demands for product and/or service, to negotiate those products and services, to record all the referring data the negotiation, as well as the meeting of the necessities, and render this information available for future access.

The products and services should be registered according to a classification furnished by the users of the system. This classification determines categories of products and services. For each category, it is permitted to create a subcategory whose hierarchy and granulates should be determined according to the nature of the product and service. For example, to register pills of a certain analgesic, the user should comply with the following classification: Health-Medications-Analgesic-Pills. Hence, the system should present an interface that allows the user to follow, without additional work, this hierarchy.

The supplies and demands should be register associated to some information. Moreover, to register a supply or a demand, the associated product or the service has to be registered in the system. The commons information to supply and demand are: the type of the supply or demand (product or service), the identification of the product or service, the value, the quantity of the product or the quantity of time of execution of service. Specifically, for the supply, the users should specify the time of delivery of the product or necessary time of preparation to execution of the service, the product shelf life and the type of negotiation required. The types of negotiation allowed are exchanging, acquisition, donation or loan.

The proposed system focuses on process support, beginning with the pre-negotiation phase up to the signing of the agreement. Each kind of negotiation presents certain particulars that should be considered. Therefore, generically, we can observe that there are procedures related to these kinds of negotiation that, if efficiently executed, can improve results. These common procedures will be considered in this research, allowing the system not to be limited to a certain type of negotiation.

The functions of system were developed based on the negotiation process phases presented in section 2.2 and divided in to four classes: identification of supplies and compatible demands, supporting the prenegotiation phase, supporting the communication between the users and supporting the negotiation. For each class, the objectives and difficulties were identified and potential uses of CSCW were determined in order to facilitate their execution, reaching the objectives identified. These classes are detailed in the next section.

3.1 Identification of supplies and compatible demands

In the context of this research, it is necessary to identify demand(s) compatible with the registered supply(s). This identification can be accomplished by the user when consulting the system data. However, the proposal is allowing for automatic identification by the system. Once the supplies and compatible demands, are identified the system should notify the users responsible for the demand and supply. Thus, the negotiations can be stimulated and accelerated by the system.

Toward this aim a virtual user that should play the role of “Negotiation Agent” should be created. From the moment that one of the users involved in the possible negotiation identified registers entry in the system, a virtual user called “Negotiation Agent” should be displayed on the screen and a notification message will be sent to the user. This option presents a virtual claim and an additional facility for those users who do not have the habits of accessing their mailbox frequently.

3.2 Support to the pre-negotiation phase

After a compatible demand with is identified supply, the involved users can be interested in the negotiation. The first step is preparing for the negotiation. The support to the activities in the preparation phase can be divided in two levels: level of user and level of decision in the pre-negotiation phase.

In the level of user, every user registered in the system will have an exclusive access individual area, called My Information, where all the important information about the negotiation can be stored, as for instance, the BATNA. This information will not be accessed by other users.

If there is just one compatible supply to a certain demand, the system should identify this crossed data and notify the interested users. However, a possible situation is the existence of more than one demand for same supply or more than one supply for same demand. In the system, it is not allowed to negotiate a supply or a demand with more than one user. Hence, in both cases mentioned above, the users have a problem of decision to be solved.

Thus, in the level of decision in the pre-negotiation phase, the system define an evaluation scheme of the possibilities establishing a priority among these users responsible for supply (in case of more than one supply) or users responsible for demand (in case of more than one demand), that is, the system should process a Ranking among competitive users. At this point, the idea of a virtual user can be processed. The “Negotiation Agent” can have the stance of a decision agent, facilitating the decision-making process of the users responsible for the supplies or demands. It is important to remark that this decision agent has a passive behavior, that is, the final decision will always be taken by the user that has the permission to process this operation.

For the system to process that ranking, the users should establish priorities among the associated information the supplies and demands. For competitive supplies, the main criterion for valuation is the type of the negotiation. For example, in case a supply is available for sale and another is available for donation, the system should prioritize the donation. Additional criterions are the value of the supply and the product delivery time. The user responsible for the demand should inform the system which is more important and the system should establish priorities among supplies considering these informations.

On the other hand, one criterion to prioritize competitive demands is to evaluate them through an analysis of the history of their supplies, that is, the system should provide benefits to those users who display a larger number of supplies of products and services. The evaluation of the history of supply to determine a priority among the competitive demands should be seen as a way to stimulate the use of the system and consequently the cooperation among its users.

3.3 Support to the communication between the users

During the negotiation process, it is essential to stimulate the communication and cooperation among users to facilitate information exchange and negotiation process development. The electronic mail systems can be used to render the asynchronous communication among the users of the system possible.

The available resources in the Instant Messenger tools can be adapted in order to identify online users and exchange information in real time using a CHAT. This resource allows for informal communication among these users channel which is extremely important for the success of the negotiation process. This chat cannel will called Window of negotiation .

Moreover, the users involved in a negotiation will have access to a common area, called ‘Our window’ , where they can to include important information about the negotiation, as for instance, the agenda of the negotiation. To such aim the bulletin board will be used, a CSCW tool supporting the asynchronous communication among users through a free area and shared by a group, being able to attach, read and answer the available messages. The bulletin board can also be used by those users who need a more explicit advertisement of their supplies/demands. This alternative provides the users with a graphic facility to highlight the advantages of their proposals, for the products and services supplies as well as for their demands.

3.4 Support of the negotiation process

After the identification of a compatible offer with a demand, the users responsible for the offer and for the demand of the product (or service) should confirm their interest in negotiating the product (or service).

The interest being confirmed, begin with the first stage of the negotiation in the system: ‘Preparation for negotiation’ . At this point, the users can access the window ‘My information’ for the pre-negotiation phase. After the preparation, one of the users should start the contact. At this point, the system alters the stage of the negotiation to ‘Negotiation in process’ and the users can access the Arena of Negotiation, composed of all the communication tools mentioned in the previous section.

The users can use of message exchanges, offers, counter-offers in the Window of negotiation . Communication among users is facilitated through CHAT and stimulated through automatic online identification of users. Moreover, through ‘Our window’ the access to important information the negotiation becomes faster, and the risk of losing this information is reduced.

In a general way, after the agreement, the next step in the negotiations is the signing of the commitment term or agreement. In the proposed system, when the users confirm the interest in the negotiation, the electronic form of agreement (EFA) begins to be generated, automatically. In this form, the system is responsible, for it increases the following information: identification of the involved users (name, position, Agency), description of the product or service negotiated and type of the negotiation (changes, donation, acquisition).

However, during the state Preparation of negotiation , the users must establish who will have the function of filling out of the topics resolved at the end of the process. This user is called responsible user for EFA . In the stage “Negotiation in process”, after the agreement, the users should inform to system that the agreement was reached and the system should alters the stage of the negotiation to the stage ‘Pending EFA’ . Thus, the responsible user for EFA should make its completion and, having finished, the form is sent automatically to all the users involved for approval. The negotiation is only completed when all the parts approve the EFA. At this point, the state of the negotiation is altered to ‘Completed Negotiation’ . While this does not happen, the negotiation stays in the system under the stage ‘Pending EFA’ . That functionality can be seen as an electronic signature of contract, since, the negotiation is not concluded before the approval of all the involved users, with the agreement registered in the system.

Figure 3 illustrates the evolution of the negotiation process in SYSTOC. The rectangles represent the stage of the process, the arrows the activities responsible for the transition of those stages and the ellipses highlight the important activities in each state. Graphic: Evolution of the negotiation process in SYSTOC

Figure 3.Figure 3.

The virtual user concept can also be adapted to accompany the negotiation process. The system should send messages to the users involved in a negotiation. The messages sent should provide information about the situation of the negotiation process associated to the user. Moreover, attached to the message, there should be the e-mails of the users associated to the negotiation and links to allow the users direct access to the system at the point where they should place some activity. Below, a model of a message that should be sent to the supplying when the system identifies a compatible demand is present: “This message is a notification to inform that one demand for your product or service was identified. To collect additional information and to know details of demand:http://www/link_demand_identify To cancel supply:http://www/link_cancel_supply”. This monitoring, besides promoting faster negotiation among the users of the system, can be understood as another facilitator to the process, as it can identify and stimulate possible negotiations.

In the system, the negotiation history is stored, containing the involved users, the product or the service negotiated, the time of duration of the negotiation in the system (beginning of the preparation stage) and EFA. Moreover, the users will have access to an area where they can evaluate the commitment of the parts in the negotiation. That evaluation is optional. Hence, this information can be transformed into knowledge to be applied in future negotiations.

3.5 Architecture of the SYSTOC

The architecture of the proposed system is distributed in three layers as illustrated in figure 4: access web layer, control layer and data layer.

The Access Web layer is responsible for allowing the entry of data in the system (products, supplies, demands and users) through the Supply Portal (supply data), Demand Portal (demand data), Administrator Portal (administrator of system area in which the users are registers) and User Portal (where the users can be to register their products and services, edit individual information and visualize information about their negotiations). Moreover, this layer is responsible for maintenance a support interface for the negotiations in process through the Negotiation Portal. The Negotiation Portal comprises My Window, Window of Negotiation and Our Window. The Negotiation Portal is accessed through User Portal that, for its time, accessed when the user registers the entrance in the system.

The Control layer is composed by three modules. The search module, responsible for the search accomplished in the system as supplies, demands and history of previous negotiations. The identification module, responsible for identifying supplies and compatible demands through the data inserted at the supplier and demand portal. Finally, the agent module is responsible for the functions of the Agent of the Negotiation: accompaniment of the negotiation and ranking of competitive users.

The Data layer is responsible for the maintenance of the data manipulated in the system: products, service, supplies, demands, users and historical of the negotiations. Graphic: Architecture of the SYSTOC

Figure 4.Figure 4.

The document for the SYSTOC software requirements specification was elaborated from February to May 2003, following the IEEE template guidelines [13].

This requirements specification document describes all functional and non-functional (interface, hardware and communication) requirements for the system, the documentation and development plan of the system according to the architecture presented in this paper. The specification was approved and the implementation of the system awaits authorization. After deployment, the system will be evaluated considering the number of accomplished negotiations and through a questionnaire that should be answered when an user finishes his first negotiation in the system. That questionnaire is being elaborated based on NSS evaluation proposals found in the literature [10],[16].

4.   Conclusion

A study about the Inventory and its Management has been necessary to specify the requirements of the system requested by the Brazilian Ministery Defense. With this study we were able to identify situations where excess inventory is inevitable even if a management mistake has not occurred The solution to that problem proposed in this work is the cooperative negotiation of the excesses through a system whose focus is to offer support to that process.

In the system, the use of CSCW and NSS tools has been analyzed. Thus, we could identify tools and functions associated those areas which can be appropriately adapted to each step of the negotiation process.

The CSCW tools used in the system stimulate the cooperation and facilitate the communication among its users. The accompaniment of the negotiation stimulates and speeds up the process. Ranking among competitive users facilitates the decision-making process. The automatic identification between supplies and compatible demands is an important starting point for the possible negotiations that can be performed. Moreover, the information stored in system can be important in future negotiations generating knowledge for its users.

With the system, the negotiation process can be put in order. Negotiation should be organized in a well-structured process including preparation (with elaboration of the BATNA), negotiation (with elaboration of agenda of negotiation, issue discussion and exchanging offers and counter-offers) and making the final agreement through EFA fulfillment.

Therefore, this work addresses a new context in which information technology (IT) can add value, through the CSCW, for providing support to the Negotiation Process between organizations, and facilitating process integration in the Supply Chain.

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