Design of a demand-driven collaborative supply-chain planning and fulfilment system for distributed enterprises

Abstract

E-Business technologies have provided new ways of working and thus revolutionized how business is conducted. E-Business technologies touch every aspect of business: from order processing to logistics execution. Such technologies are relevant to businesses of all sizes and types, and can potentially offer significant advantages including the means and models to help companies reshape their value proposition and integrate their business with customers. An emerging area of focus is that of collaborative supply-chain planning and fulfilment in distributed enterprises. This paper addresses the design issues of a demand-driven planning and fulfilment system enabling collaboration across distributed enterprises.

Keywords:

• Supply-chain planning and fulfilment system
• collaboration
• distributed enterprises

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their suggestions. The authors also thank Mr Howard Richards, who was a project leader of ESPRIT 20544, for reviewing this paper.

Harris Makatsoris: Dr Harris Makatsoris is a founder and director of Orion Logic Ltd, a UK-based software and services vendor of adaptive, sense-and-respond value network optimization and control software. IC Innovations Ltd, a subsidiary of Imperial College London, is one of the founding shareholders of the company. Dr Makatsoris has led the design and development of the company's flagship product. Earlier in his career he led the design and development team in an ECU9 million project that involved the development of a collaborative supply-chain optimization and control system developed together with leading European semiconductor manufacturing companies. He is also a partner in UDS SA, a highly successful IT outsourcing service provider in Greece. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a doctorate degree in Computer-aided Systems Engineering from Imperial College London, with a specialization in Production and Supply Chain Optimization. He has published a number of papers in this field.

Yoon Chang: Dr Chang is currently with the School of Air Transport, Transportation and Logistics, Hankuk Aviation University, and a non-executive director of Orion Logic Ltd. Prior to his current position, was a senior research associate of the Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge, UK. He has also been a senior software engineer and senior consultant at i2 technologies, USA from 1998–2001. He was awarded twice by i2 for the excellence in the Supply-chain Management projects. During 1997–1998, he was with Arizona States University, Tempe, USA, as a visiting assistant professor of the Department of Industrial Engineering. He got his Ph.D. degree from Imperial College, Science, Technology and Medicine, University of London, UK, in 1997 with a specialization in computer-aided systems engineering.

Notes

¹The implementation of the resource management software units is such that it adheres to the software agent paradigm in the sense that each acts as a modular task fulfilment unit. Hence, in the rest of the paper they will be referred to as agents. However, in the present implementation most functionality in communication layers is handled by CORBA instead of message-oriented languages of existing agent platforms such as FIPA. That is, because CORBA is more widely accepted than any pure agent platform at present. An agent models a particular resource domain such as a manufacturing unit, a warehouse, one or more suppliers etc.