مطالعه موردی درون سازمانی،پشتیبانی جریان کار سیستم های مدیریت زنجیره تامین

Doing business over the Internet is cheap and convenient. This enlarges the view of enterprises and gives them an opportunity to select their partners. To support business-to-business operations, an information system (IS) with an embedded workflow management component is needed. The inherent characteristics of such a system makes it suitable to implement cross-organization management. Nowadays, however, these system additions are not common. When developing a supply chain management (SCM) system for a large motorcycle corporation in China, we had to construct an inter-enterprise architecture using the internet. The main part of this is a workflow-supported inner supply chain system and an integrated interface. In it, the business processes are defined and executed by the supply chain management system. The independent inner systems are connected by the integrated interface into a large, global, supply chain manage system to management business processes across the independent enterprises. This paper presents the system design and implementation and discusses our experiences and lessons learned.

Business organizations today face a complex and competitive environment. Because of this, e-commerce is becoming more dynamic. It is now termed open E-commerce [18]. In this, different enterprises put their services and resources together so that they appear to be a traditional enterprise to their customers but are better called virtual enterprises (VE) [4]. The relationship between members is thus different from that within a traditional enterprise, because the members are independent, constituent, and dynamic and the business process is scattered over multiple enterprises and subject to frequent change. However, the agility of a company’s response to customer demand has been recognized as a critical success factor in meeting competition. This implies that a cross-enterprise IS, is pressingly needed. It should aid in implementing interoperability among independent enterprises, smoothing the information flow between them, and deploying business processes over multiple enterprises. To satisfy and respond quickly to the requirements, many companies are now focusing on supply chain management (SCM) system in order to strengthen their ability to compete. This has therefore been recognized as an important area for IT innovation and investment [2]. Workflow is the automation of a business process. It has now been adopted as a way to implement the cross organization management needed to carry out businesses. The internet’s world-wide web has become the prime driver of contemporary electronic commerce (E-commerce). Phan [15] holds the view that the most successful new business models are probably those that can integrate IT to all activities of the enterprise-wide value chain

5. Conclusion SCM focuses on implementation of interoperability between independent enterprises and deployment of business processes over multiple enterprises. Here, a SCM system supported by inter-enterprise workflow architecture was discussed. This architecture of the system consisted of a workflow-supported inner supply chain system and an integrated interface. The inner workflow-supported supply chain management system was used to define and control the execution of business processes within the enterprise. Through the integrated interface, the whole supply chain system across several independent enterprises was implemented and the information exchange was fulfilled. There are, however, several problems with our current system. 1. Integration is based on database sharing by encapsulation; thus some integrity and safety features are not well kept and the inner system becomes tightly-coupled. This may lead to conflicts between sub-systems. Nevertheless, the idea of enterprises application integration (EDI) in BizTalk may provide a way to solve such problems [12]. 2. Different suppliers have different ontologies, and mapping between them is not easy [19]. This means that a word-for-word mapping is not available in ontology translation. 3. Rapid change of business process, and the dynamic, uncertain and error-prone work environment require the addition of an adaptive workflow system [10].