A service-oriented framework for agent-based simulations of collaborative supply chains

Current collaborative practices of supply chain management are limited to some known configurations where a dominant member sets the pace for the collaboration extent. Extending collaborative models to supply chains without a dominant member requires defining a fair assessment of costs and benefits and how they are distributed among members. To understand collaborative models and their mechanisms, simulation-based approaches are recommended as they can afford the complexity of real scenarios. However, building ad-hoc simulation models for studying complex supply chain interactions can be prohibitive in terms of both cost and time. Therefore, the availability of simulation frameworks, to be used easily by business managers and facilitating the development of those models, has a strong incentive in the quest of current business efforts to increase their supply chain performance. The objective of this work is to present a systematic and reusable serviceoriented framework for agent based simulation to support the analysis of collaborative interactions in supply chains. Results of a requirement analysis performed to this aim are described, and the fulfillment of identified requirements by the proposed framework, and capabilities thereof, are discussed.     

The acceptance and use of customer relationship management (CRM) systems: An empirical study of distribution service industry in Taiwan

With the rapid change of business competitive environment, enterprise resource integration and innovative issues of business operation have gradually become the most important issues for businesses. Furthermore, many enterprises have implemented novel information technology and developing the innovative e-business applications systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), knowledge management (KM) and supply chain management (SCM) to enhance their competitive advantages. CRM systems can help organizations to gain the potential new customers, promote the existing customers’ purchase, maintain good relationship with customers as well as to enhance the customer value, thus can improve the enterprise images. Moreover, the development and applications of CRM systems have also been considered as important issues for researchers and practitioners in recent years. For Taiwan’s industry, it has been gradually transferred from manufacturing-oriented to a service-oriented. Thus, the service industry has higher percentage in the GDP and in which the distribution service industry is the biggest one and be a core industry in the whole of service industry. The main purpose of this study is to explore the factors affecting the acceptance and use of CRM systems. Furthermore, the proposed research model was built on the basis of unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and task-technology fit (TTF) framework as well as technological and managerial theories. The implications of findings for practice will be discussed.     

Specifying information systems for business process integration – A management perspective*

Supply chain management and customer relationship management are concepts for optimizing the provision of goods to customers. Information sharing and information estimation are key tools used to implement these two concepts. The reduction of delivery times and stock levels can be seen as the main managerial objectives of an integrative supply chain and customer relationship management. To achieve this objective, business processes need to be integrated along the entire supply chain including the end consumer. Information systems form the backbone of any business process integration. The relevant information system architectures are generally well-understood, but the conceptual specification of information systems for business process integration from a management perspective, remains an open methodological problem. To address this problem, we will show how customer relationship management and supply chain management information can be integrated at the conceptual level in order to provide supply chain managers with relevant information. We will further outline how the conceptual management perspective of business process integration can be supported by deriving specifications for enabling information system from business objectives. This work has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung), record no. 01HW0196.     

Enterprise systems and demand chain management: a cross-sectional field study

Increased product variety, compressed cycle times, supply chain network based competition and the uncertainty in business environment are forcing organizations to shift their emphasis towards demand chain management. Though enterprise systems and supply chain management software solutions are well in place in most of the large enterprises in Australia, their ability to support demand chain management approach is not yet known. This paper investigates the adoption of demand chain management in Australian organizations using cross-sectional qualitative field study. It found that the adoption is limited despite the organizational capabilities and sound digital platforms. Standardization, integration, visibility and control of processes and information, enabled by enterprise systems, are helping the organizations in improving their ability to sense and shape market demand and customer needs, and build agility into their decision making processes. Attempts to synchronise operating and finance cycles and collecting market intelligence and sharing of that across the supply chain are some of the initiatives that have started showing benefits. Adopting the demand chain management initiatives such as establishment of market intelligence mechanism, building agility into decision making processes, sophisticated usage of optimization tools embedded in software solutions, and process frameworks such as Supply Chain Operations Reference are helping organizations to achieve both agility and control simultaneously.     

Agent-Based Supply Chain Integration

Supply chain management represents a critical competency in today's fast-paced, global business environment. However, in the current transition from EDI to Web-based supply chain technologies, much of the capability for process integration is being lost. And the integration of buyer and seller supply chain processes is critical for speed and responsiveness in today's hypercompetitive product and service markets. Intelligent agent technology offers the potential to overcome many limitations of current supply chain technologies. This paper presents intelligent supply chain agents that represent and autonomously conduct business on behalf of product users, buyers and vendors. We classify and present numerous extant agent applications and extend a technological framework to compare and contrast intelligent agents with other classes of information technology. We then describe an agent-based supply chain process design, along with its developmental techniques, and the structure and behavior of an agent federation used for integration in a major enterprise. We present results of this exploratory research in terms of technical feasibility and process performance in the enterprise context. This work is novel in that it integrates process-level knowledge from operational enterprises with distributed agent technologies. And it makes a contribution by demonstrating how agent-based supply chain integration can be effected along a large-scale, operational, inter-organizational process.     

基于SOA的供应链管理平台设计与实现

为解决供应链中因各类差异性问题导致的异构系统集成困难,提出了一种基于面向服务体系架构的供应链管理平台,设计了由业务流程开发平台、业务执行平台和IT资源集成层组成的三层平台体系架构,给出了管理平台中最为核心的业务执行引擎和企业服务总线体系及工作原理.将管理平台应用于以摩托车整车装配企业为核心的供应链集成管理中,有效降低了供应链中各异构系统之间业务整合与数据整合难度,表明了该平台的有效性与可拓展性.     

Information sharing and business systems leveraging in supply chains: An empirical investigation of one web-based application

Web-based supply chain applications promise to provide information sharing capabilities that will enhance the participating organizations’ information capabilities and business benefits. We performed an empirical study of a sophisticated Web-based supply chain application to determine the effect of such information sharing and business systems leveraging on business benefits. We also examined the importance of relational concurrence (i.e., shared business interests among supply chain partners), as an antecedent to both information sharing and business systems leveraging. Our work showed that both information sharing and business system leveraging provided important business benefits and that relational concurrence was only marginally related to information sharing and not at all related to business systems leveraging, limiting the significance attributed to this factor in prior research on inter-organizational systems.     

Global Supply Chain Design

I review principles and methods of global supply chain design, especially from two viewpoints, in this paper. The first perspective is focused on the practitioner who is interested in an overview of the key concepts and applications of supply chain design within a global context. The second theme of this paper is to assess opportunities for research to extend supply chain design in useful directions, particularly into closely related areas such as supply chain operations and information systems.     

基于语义Web服务的业务过程集成的研究及实现

文中在分析目前业务过程集成所存在的问题(如缺乏统一描述、各系统之间缺乏语义等问题)的基础上,采用最新的语义Web服务技术设计了一种基于语义Web服务的业务过程集成模型,该模型不仅支持跨企业的业务合作,而且使在本领域内有共同的语义基础及业务过程规范,从而增强了企业间业务集成能力和协调能力。最后给出了一个简化的供应链上企业间业务过程集成的应用实例的设计与实现。     

BROSEMWEB: A brokerage service for e-Procurement using Semantic Web Technologies

The Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA) development paradigm has emerged to make an improvement in critical situations such as creating, modifying and extending solutions in the domain of business processes integration. Web services technologies are considered as the main units for SOA, for both intra- and inter-enterprise communication. Nevertheless, SOA does not have information about the events that occurs in business processes, which represents the main characteristics of supply chain management. Taking this into account, this paper proposes a middleware-oriented integrated architecture with the use of semantic features (concretely with the use of Linked Data) as data provider to offer a brokerage service for the procurement of products in a Supply Chain Management (SCM). As main contributions, our system provides a hybrid architecture that combines features of both SOA and EDA between several others.     

基于供应链的企业信息系统集成设计

企业信息系统集成的体系结构可以考虑从纵向和横向两个方面进行研究。以纵向的观点,在系统的开发设计过程中,结合系统工程与软件工程引入供应链的三链（决策链、支撑链、主链）并使其贯穿于系统开发设计过程的始终;以横向的观点,建立在供应链上的各企业的信息集成可以通过计算机协同工作、人工智能、数据库等技术实现,供应链上的每一个生产单元均是虚拟企业,它们均可以以计算机可以识别的信息进行描述与表示,企业的集成实际上就是这样一些信息企业内部及供应链上（企业之间）进行动态或静态的数据集成。同时,针对任务的转换与分解、智能体系设计、数据组织与管理体系设计等问题分别进行了相应的讨论。     

Review of supply chain performance measurement systems: 1998–2015

In today’s competitive business environment, supply chain performance is one of the most critical issues in various industries. It is argued that supply chain performance measurement is fundamental to efficient supply chain management. Over the past two decades, several frameworks and systems have been developed to meet this need. This study reviews the literature in the field of supply chain performance measurement and assembles an overview of those systems, approaches, techniques and criteria. For this purpose, 83 of 374 related articles from 1998 to 2015 were selected for final review using the Scopus and ISI databases. Findings disclose that performance measurement in supply chain contexts is still a fruitful area of research. The study also provides an overview of the performance measures employed in supply chain systems. These findings present a solid basis for future academic and practitioner work in the field of supply chain performance measurement.     

A reference system for internet based inter-enterprise electronic commerce

As supply chain management and its global outsourcing are widely spread recently, many researches and development focus on integration of inter-enterprise information systems. The most important factors to achieve inter-enterprise integration are standardization and digitalization. The objectives of this work are to develop the reference model for internet based inter-enterprise electronic commerce and to implement a prototype system for its fundamental issues such as business process, information standards, and information system integration. The electronics assembly processes are chosen as the target industry. For the reference architecture of inter-enterprise electronic commerce, we also investigate intra-enterprise business processes and model them with IDEF0. The standard documents and its items are defined from analysis of traditional documents for outsourcing processes and EDI documents. For standard exchange method, web-based XML is adopted, and corresponding DTD and XSL for RFQ and Quotation are developed. In order to prove feasibility and effectiveness of the reference system a prototype system is introduced and implemented.     

Research issues in testing business components

The advantages of migrating from traditional monolithic business applications to reusable object-based business components (self-contained software that carries out a certain business task) are well documented. A business system assembled from reusable components is argued to be highly reliable since these components have been tested and used in many other business applications. However, all possible uses of components are not known at design and construction stage. Additionally, integration testing is needed as components are assembled to make business application systems. Component-based software development requires that testing issues be addressed adequately. In this paper, we explore testing related issues in business components and in particular, business application systems that are made by integrating these components. An integration test strategy for business component application systems is proposed.     

A case study of an inter-enterprise workflow-supported supply chain management system

Doing business over the Internet is cheap and convenient. This enlarges the view of enterprises and gives them an opportunity to select their partners. To support business-to-business operations, an information system (IS) with an embedded workflow management component is needed. The inherent characteristics of such a system makes it suitable to implement cross-organization management. Nowadays, however, these system additions are not common. When developing a supply chain management (SCM) system for a large motorcycle corporation in China, we had to construct an inter-enterprise architecture using the internet. The main part of this is a workflow-supported inner supply chain system and an integrated interface. In it, the business processes are defined and executed by the supply chain management system. The independent inner systems are connected by the integrated interface into a large, global, supply chain manage system to management business processes across the independent enterprises. This paper presents the system design and implementation and discusses our experiences and lessons learned.     

Autonomic tracing of production processes with mobile and agent-based computing

Tracing items in a supply chain, across different enterprises and through the full processes scope, is today an inherently complex design task. Enterprises are typically comprised of hundreds of applications that are custom built at different times, acquired from third parties and parts of legacy systems, and also operating in multiple tiers of different manufacturing and information system platforms. Further, traceability is characterized by a goal-oriented approach, in which business-process analyses are driven by goal achievements rather than by systematic engineering processes. The use of a classical enterprise integration approach mostly needs tailoring to different applications. Due to the number and diversity of the systems and of their interactions, and to their dynamicity, it is difficult, costly, and therefore often not convenient to develop in large scale distributed systems.To overcome these issues, a supply chain traceability system with a high level of automation is discussed in this paper. In particular, the system adopts an agent-based approach, in which cooperative software agents find solutions to back-end tracing problems by self-organization. Such cooperative agents are based on a business process aware traceability model, and on a service-oriented composition paradigm. Furthermore, an interface agent assists each user to carry out the front-end tracking activities. Interface agents rely on the context-awareness paradigm to gain self-configurability and self-adaptation of the user interface, and on ubiquitous computing technology, i.e., mobile devices and radio-frequency identification, to perform agile and automatic lot identification. The paper comprises real-world experiences on the fashion supply chain.     

Systems dynamics modelling of a manufacturing supply chain system

Supply chains are multifaceted structures focusing on the integration of all the factors involved in the overall process of production and distribution of end products to the customers. Growing interest in supply chain systems has highlighted the need to adopt appropriate approaches that can ensure the efficient management of their complexity, enormity and broadness of scope. With the main aim of supply chain management being to optimise the performance of supply chains, attention is mainly drawn to the development of modelling frameworks that can be utilised to analyse and comprehend the dynamic behaviour of supply chains. While there have been only a few supply chain modelling attempts reported in the literature, this paper proposes a modelling framework that is used to simulate the operation of a supply chain network of moderate complexity. The proposed model comprises four echelons and is build around a central medium-sized manufacturing company operating as a typical Make-to-Order (MTO) system. The developed model was built using a systems dynamics (SD) approach. The operations performed within a supply chain are a function of a great number of key variables which often seem to have strong interrelationships. The ability of understanding the network as a whole, analysing the interactions between the various components of the integrated system and eventually supplying feedback without de-composing it make systems dynamics an ideal methodology for modelling supply chain networks. The objective of the paper is to model the operation of the supply chain network under study and obtain a true reflection of its behaviour. The modelling framework is also used to study the performance of the system under the initial conditions considered and compare it with that obtained by running the system under eight different scenarios concerning commonly addressed real-life operational conditions. The modelling effort has focused on measuring the supply chain system performance in terms of key metrics such as inventory, WIP levels, backlogged orders and customer satisfaction at all four echelons. The study concludes with the analysis of the obtained results and the conclusions drawn from contrasting the system’s performance under each investigated scenario to that of the benchmark model.     

面向制造服务的企业间信息集成方案

针对制造企业向供应链后端扩展的战略意义,文中从W企业开展以产品维修服务为主体内容的制造服务发展战略与业务需求为背景,坚持“业务驱动、IT引领”的方针,在新的需求基础上,充分理解业务,采用信息化手段优化、管理、控制业务流程,使业务数据标准化、规范化、集成化。文中以此为目的,提出了以维修服务为主体业务的制造服务企业间信息集成方案,研究了维修服务系统的工作原理以及整体需求。结合具体的系统需求,应用基于组件的系统分析设计思想,获取了系统业务组件及其组件问的依赖关系,最终给出了维修服务系统组件部署方案。     

Integrating a case-based reasoning shell and Web 2.0: design recommendations and insights

The design and implementation of case-based reasoning (CBR) applications is time-consuming. To facilitate the development of CBR applications in various problem domains, the CBR community has created a number of CBR shells and software frameworks in the past twenty years. This paper provides a review of the state-of-the-art of CBR shells and software frameworks, highlights why the integration of Web 2.0 and CBR development tools is useful, and gives an example as to how we implement such integration. We use this example to illustrate how Web 2.0 features such as blogging functions can be integrated in a CBR system. Design recommendations and insights for implementing a Web 2.0-based CBR shell are also provided.     

An Architecture for Supply Chain Integration and Automation on the Internet

Electronic commerce is happening at a very fast pace and business-to-business ecommerce is taking the lead, a very important part of which is the supply chain integration and automation. There is a high demand for well accepted interoperability standards which need to be fitted together for supply chain integration to meet the business demands such as being able to integrate catalogs from different companies. This will facilitate product comparisons and producing customized catalogs. Given an anchor product anywhere on the supply chain, it should be possible to obtain information on related products that complement or add value to this anchor product. Yet another key issue is the full automation of the supply chain processes. However since a single dominant electronic commerce standard is unlikely, the supply chain integration and automation should be able to accommodate different standards like OBI or OTP. This will make it possible for users to conform to the standards of their choice.Another important fact is that rigid supply chains can co-exist with supply chains formed on the fly where participants can transact business spontaneously since the Web is able to make the information instantly available to all trading partners. Facilitating resource discovery that is discovering information on possible partners and their catalogs on the Internet and transacting business automatically also becomes an important issue.The architecture developed within the scope of this paper addresses these issues. We have used the emerging technologies and standards as the infrastructure of the system proposed; and integrated these to meet the needs of supply chain integration and automation and demonstrated how each of the mentioned functionality can be achieved.