Virtual situation rooms: connecting people across enterprises for supply-chain agility

Abstract

Agility and time-based manufacturing are critical success factors for today's manufacturing enterprise. To be competitive, enterprises must integrate their supply chains more effectively and forge close memberships with customers and suppliers more quickly. Consequently, technologies must be developed that enable enterprises to respond to consumer demand more quickly, integrate with suppliers more effectively, adapt to market variations more efficiently and evolve product designs with manufacturing practices more seamlessly. The mission of the Extended-Enterprise Coalition for Integrated Collaborative Manufacturing Systems coalition is to research, develop, and demonstrate technologies to enable the integration of manufacturing applications in a multi-company supply chain planning and execution environment. We believe real-time and asynchronous collaboration technology will play a critical role in allowing manufacturers to increase their supply chain agility. We are realizing our efforts through our Virtual Situation Room (VSR) technology. The primary goal of the VSR technology is to enhance current ad-hoc, limited methods and mechanisms for spontaneous, real-time communication using feature-rich, industry standards-based building blocks and network protocols. VSR technology is being designed to find and engage quickly all relevant members of a problem solving team supported by highly interactive, conversational access to information and control and enabled by business processes, security policies and technologies, intelligence, and integration tools.