Automating Supply Chains

A recent study found that supply-chain problems cost companies between 9 and 20 percent of their value over a six-month period (T.J. Becker, 2000). The problems range from part shortages to poorly utilized plant capacity. When you place this in the context of the overall business-to-business (B2B) market expected to reach US$7 trillion by 2004 (37 percent of which is projected to be e-commerce sales), it is easy to see that effective supply-chain management (SCM) tools could save companies billions of dollars. Attempts to automate solutions to these problems are complicated by the need for the different companies in a supply chain to maintain the integrity and confidentiality of their information systems and operations. The modeling technologies currently used within the manufacturing business-to-business standards communities, such as the Open Applications Group (http://www.openapplications.org) and RosettaNet (http://www.rosettanet.org) do a good job of capturing user requirements. Unfortunately, current technologies do not explicitly link the requirements to formal process models. This missing link is crucial to efficient SCM implementations.