Development of collaborative transportation management framework with Web Services for TFT–LCD supply chains

Abstract

Under the fierce global competition, enterprises face the challenge to respond quickly and accurately to customers' diverse requirements. Excessive lead time, improper control of transportation resources and inaccessibility of tracking information may lead to ineffective and unreliable delivery. The seamless integration of trading partners such as suppliers, manufacturers and global third party logistics service providers (G3PLs) can improve the supply chain execution. With supply chain collaboration, lead time can be significantly shortened whereas the resource utilisation can be highly improved. Recently, collaborative transportation management (CTM) has provided the collaborative mechanisms of information sharing and order fulfillment for carriers and trading partners in supply chains. CTM initiative can reduce the ineffective transportation sections and better the delivery effectiveness. The heterogeneous information systems first should be integrated for starting up information sharing and data integration among carriers and trading partners. Web services possess characteristics of flexibility and interoperability that are suited for developing the inter-enterprise collaboration platform by integrating heterogeneous systems. With the web-services based CTM (WS–CTM), carrier and trading partners can collaborate on the process of order fulfilment. In this paper, the WS–CTM framework is developed to collaboratively manage transportation and distribution for a supply chain of thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT–LCD). The proposed WS–CTM can assist the panel manufacturers, system manufacturers and G3PLs to reduce the uncertainty in distribution, and improve the supply chain performance.