Business Integrated Architecture for Dynamic Supply Chain Management with Web Service

Abstract

Increased global competition and demand for greater product variety result in the emergence of dynamic supply chain, which need to be co-operated without sacrificing their flexibility. Traditional application systems such as ERP, lack the autonomy and flexibility required by dynamic network. EDI is costly and EDI interfaces miss the decision values and logistic control required for supply chain management. Given the limitations of EDI application and traditional application system, this paper is aimed at exploring a new adaptable software architecture to realize enterprise application integration across organizational network. The functional structure and service platform of a software component architecture in the supply chain management are presented. Due to the simple and low-cost method provided for information communication and sharing by Web Services, we select Web Services as our implementation technology of the software component architecture. The integral management in the architecture is executed by supply chain engines (SCEs). The SCEs manage integrated business processes intelligently and flexibly as required for dynamic supply chain. A web-service-based system architecture is proposed for the communication of the run-time data of tasks among processes in heterogeneous environments, and a prototype of the system implemented is presented.