Designing an e-business integrative platform: a case for the air cargo logistics industry

With the challenges of global e-business, online partnering and collaborative planning increase logistics service agent's competitiveness and enhance logistics process performance. In this paper, we provide a technical design for a website where both commerce activities and business processes are conducted, for the air cargo industry in Hong Kong. This platform website is a fourth party community infrastructure where air cargo logistics services can be designed, traded and managed. The objective of this paper is to show the technical issues involved in designing a platform of this genre. The principal aspects of system requirement, system architecture, interface design and information representation requirement are addressed. We also examine the difference of designing such a platform with more traditional website, as well as highlighting the complexities and issues involved.