طراحی و توسعه سیستم مبتنی بر عامل تدارک و تامین به منظور ارتقاء هوش کسب و کار(هوش تجاری)

The purpose of this research is to propose a procurement system across other disciplines and retrieved information with relevant parties so as to have a better co-ordination between supply and demand sides. This paper demonstrates how to analyze the data with an agent-based procurement system (APS) to re-engineer and improve the existing procurement process. The intelligence agents take the responsibility of searching the potential suppliers, negotiation with the short-listed suppliers and evaluating the performance of suppliers based on the selection criteria with mathematical model. Manufacturing firms and trading companies spend more than half of their sales dollar in the purchase of raw material and components. Efficient data collection with high accuracy is one of the key success factors to generate quality procurement which is to purchasing right material at right quality from right suppliers. In general, the enterprises spend a significant amount of resources on data collection and storage, but too little on facilitating data analysis and sharing. To validate the feasibility of the approach, a case study on a manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) has been conducted. APS supports the data and information analyzing technique to facilitate the decision making such that the agent can enhance the negotiation and suppler evaluation efficiency by saving time and cost.

Today’s enterprises require to face the challenge of responding to turbulent market change, meeting the escalating customer requirements and providing the quality product within a short product lifecycle. Procurement is a crucial process and it accounts for more than half of enterprises’ sales volume. For manufacturing firms, products are made of raw materials and components. For trading companies, purchasing the goods and then supplying the customers are the crucial business activities. As a result, procurement is regarded as a critical process in both manufacturing firms and trading companies. According to the typical example illustrated by Arnold and Chapman (2004), profit can be increased by 10% either increasing sales volume by 10% or reducing the cost of purchase by 2%. It is realized that that the efficient procurement practices can result in costly reduction, boost of profit and enhancing quality of the products. However, procurement is a complex process involving sourcing, analyzing, negotiating and assessing. A numerous problems have been identified in the past studies and shown below. • Lack of co-ordination from buyer to production engineer. •Lack of proactive and heavily depends on the request of production engineer. •Paper-based purchasing cycle and lack of automation. • Lack of intelligent advise tools provide for find out suitable suppliers. •Difficult to evaluate the performance of the suppliers.The paper is organized to meet the following objectives to resolve the above problems: •To present a procurement system across other disciplines and retrieved information with relevant parties. •To illustrate how data are analyzed by OLAP. •To propose the intelligent agent to facilitate a smooth procurement cycle. •To demonstrate the case example about applying the proposed framework in electronic industry. •To draw some conclusions and outline the needs for further research and development.

An agent-based procurement system is introduced in this paper. The proposed system aims to improve the current subjective practice of supplier selection, price negotiation and supplier evaluation by deploying the agent technology and OLAP. Although integrated systems have been reported in the literature previously, this study differs from the literature in terms of developing agent technology and deriving supplier evaluation function related to the procurement strategy of the company. This research is not only analyzing the market data and ensures quality procurement cycle in a systematic way, but also realizing the synergy of supplier collaboration so as to enhance the efficiency of the supply network. Search agent is used to find out the potential suppliers by matching the similarity of product specifications with offers given by suppliers. Negotiable agent engages in negotiation terms so as to achieve the mutual agreement. The derived supplier evaluation function consists of environment friendly factor, reliability of quality, delivery efficiency, competitiveness of the cost and the responsiveness to the market for evaluating the performance of supplier so as to have a better supplier management. Further research will be focused on the refinement of the integrated agent based procurement system to achieve a more reliable and seamless integration with other ERP modules because procurement involves the intakes from other departments such as quality department and engineering department. Validation of the system should be implemented in the manufacturing firms such that feedback and comments of buyers and sellers helps to adjust the configuration of the system. The significant contribution of this paper is related to the effective introduction of agent technology and OLAP to the supply chain management and the dissertation of imparting intelligent demand pattern recognition to the procurement system. As designed, the proposed system enables the progressive intelligence features and elements into the supply chain. It is expected that the proposed system will enhance the international competitive edge of network manufacturers which are thereby enhancing the efficiency of the purchasing cycle.