بهبود مدیریت زنجیره تامین برای انجام معاملات کسب و کار الکترونیکی

This paper reports on the development of an open supply chain management system that is able to support the e-business activities of a contemporary enterprise. The system was first built to address the needs of a Greek textile industry and successfully integrated a workflow management module, a demand-side transactions module and a supply side transactions module with the company's legacy ERP system. The paper discusses technical issues concerning the development of the overall platform, which is able to efficiently support e-business transactions, independently of the underlying technology and communication protocols used from the related parties. Particular attention is paid to the presentation of the benefits arising from the improvement of supply chain management. The proposed approach aims at increasing the service level and establishing a cooperative environment among all parties involved, while reducing the transactions costs through the appropriate process automation and decreasing the company's inventory levels due to faster transactions.

Information and communication technologies certainly play a pervasive role in the supply chain of an enterprise, since all related activities create, use and share information. At the same time, the growing sophistication of these technologies is a powerful force in opening up possibilities for interrelationships. This has to be considered together with current market and business changes, which compel companies to establish fast, continuous and secure interactions with their trading partners, being they customers or suppliers. Efficient information integration plays a key role in supply chain management, while coordination of the supply demand relationship, by managing the flow of materials and products and the flow of information with flexible control and feedback mechanisms, is also an important issue (Thomas and Griffin, 1996; Albino et al., 2002; Claudio Garavelli, 2003). The establishment of an open supply chain management system creates opportunities for further improvements in the companies involved. Appropriate linkages may enable enterprises to fundamentally alter their supply chain relationships (Tang et al., 2001) and facilitate reduced inventory requirements. This is due to the improved information coordination capability of such an infrastructure. As comprehensively discussed in Lieb (2000), companies increase the trend toward outsourcing their inbound and outbound logistics. Thus, efficient exchange of logistics information between shippers, third party logistics providers and buyers is enhanced, leading to streamlined production planning systems and reduced inventory requirements. In addition, such an approach enables companies with new modes of supply chain information flows. As highlighted in Warkentin et al. (2000), such flows were traditionally linear, from one firm to its immediate suppliers or immediate distributors. In other words, information beyond one link in the chain was constrained by lack of formal relationships and did not convey efficiently due to a lack of data representation schemes. Modern business models and practices require dynamic and easily accessed services (Timmers, 1998). The wide and rapid adoption of Internet is re-setting the rules of how people interact, buy, sell and exchange goods and services. Contemporary ways of trading, allowing interaction between groups that could not so far economically afford to trade with each other, have been introduced. Whereas previously commercial data interchange involved mainly the transmission of data fields from one computer to another, the new model for web-based business, introduced by the advent of the Internet, is typically dependent on human interaction for the transaction to take place. The new model is principally based on the use of interactive selection of a set of options, and on the completion of electronic forms, to specify user profiles, queries, requirements, etc. To be fully interactive, a company needs to be able to understand the business concepts represented in the interchanged data, and apply business-specific rules to trigger the appropriate actions. Addressing the issues listed above, this paper reports on the development of an open supply chain management system that is able to support the e-business activities of a contemporary enterprise. The system automates efficiently intra-business, business-to-business and business-to-customer processes, while aiming at assisting all parties involved (i.e., customers, suppliers and employees of the enterprise). Section 2 presents the basic components of the proposed system and their integration with a legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system of the enterprise. Section 3 discusses various supply chain management issues paying particular attention to the presentation of the benefits arising from the adoption of the system. Finally, Section 4 concludes the paper.

There is no doubt that the need to exchange information is critical within the business community. By integrating computers and data communications into the business process, companies benefit from exchanging information electronically, in that they reduce paperwork, minimize cost and improve response time (Sodhi, 2001). Following the above lines, this paper has described an open supply chain management system for e-business. The system has been developed for the needs of a textile industry. However, our approach is suitable for any medium or large-scale organization that wants to carry out e-business transactions. To mention some, similar applications may be deployed for the chemical, electronics, computer hardware, manufacturing, telecommunications, transportation or even the public sector. The major contribution of this work is that the overall framework is able to smoothly interoperate with legacy systems, is designed around open standards for data exchange, and can be easily employed through user-friendly designed web sites by any trading partner. Moreover, it integrates a set of off-the-shelf tools that assure a robust, scalable and fast development cycle. We argue that our approach provides companies with new levels of flexibility, while helps innovative and small companies rewrite the rules of business and ensure the functionality needed to respond rapidly to future changes. Moreover, our component-based approach follows current trends of the development of e-business enterprise systems. As a final note, we point out here that in order to precisely calculate the benefits discussed in Section 3, one has to formally define appropriate performance indicators for supply chain management; this is actually one of our future work directions. Having defined such measures, one may continuously monitor the behavior of the system in order to improve its efficiency.