Patent ID: 7272626

Claim:
A method of managing business-to-business cooperation among multiple electronic service providers which enter transactions using computer processing, said method comprising the steps of: enabling distributed interaction correlation processing among said electronic service providers by attaching tags to transmission interactions among said electronic service providers, said transmission interactions including requests and responses relating to said transactions, each said tag including information that uniquely identifies a particular transaction that is related to the transmission interaction to which said tag is attached, each said tag that is attached to one of said responses including management information indicative of operational parameters that are specific to a responding electronic service provider transmitting said response and indicative of operational parameters specific to all other electronic service providers from which management information was received by said responding electronic service provider in tags attached to same-transaction responses from said other electronic service providers, said management information being accessible separately from said responses; and utilizing information within said tags to correlate said transmission interactions with said transactions, including identifying said operational parameters of said responding electronic service provider and said any other electronic service provider when one of said responses is received by an originating site in a succession of said electronic service providers that are cooperative in entering a specific transaction.