Service Oriented and Orchestrated Framework for Supply Chain Integration

Supply chain management integrates key business processes and facilities, involving end users and suppliers that provide products, services, and information. Supply chain integration can potentially add value to the stakeholders along product development and manufacturing life cycle as well as the customers in terms of cost, time, service level, quality, and risk. In the manufacturing industry, there are many attempts to develop methodologies, standards, and technologies to integrate various applications for product design and manufacturing. However, studies on integrating and aligning product design and manufacturing with other operations in supply chains are relatively lacking. In an integrated supply chain, information, applications, and services are shared and become available among supply chain members within and across organizational boundaries. Existing technologies and tools such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) infrastructures and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems do not provide a flexible and reusable solution to information sharing and application integration. This paper presents a prototype service oriented web-based system, SC Collaborator (Supply Chain Collaborator), which leverages web services, web portal, and open source technologies to provide a flexible, customizable, and economical tool for supply chain integration. The prototype system implements a service oriented portal-based framework and allows service orchestration according to processes. This paper presents the service oriented portal-based framework, the system architecture of SC Collaborator, and the schematic representation and implementation of process models with the system. The paper also illustrates the use of the SC Collaborator system to facilitate cross-functional, cross-departmental, and cross-organizational collaborations using a bus manufacturing scenario.