A Supply Chain Management Framework Based on SOA

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A Supply Chain Management Framework Based on SOA

Luo Duanhong

College of Economics and Trade, Hunan University, P.R.China, 410079 Hunan Provincial Laboratory of Logistics Information and Simulation Technology

Abstract A supply chain is a network of facilities and distribution options that performs the functions of procurement of materials, transformation of these materials into intermediate and finished products, and the distribution of these finished products to customers [1]. An effective and efficient way of managing this network is called a Supply Chain Management System (SCMS) . The proposes of this paper is to analyze and design a generic SCMS framework based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which will form the foundation for a loosely coupled, protocol independent, event-driven, standards-based SCMS that can be integrated with their supplier and their customer agilely and flexibly.

Key words: SOA Supply Chain Management System

1. Introduce

In order to surviving in today's competitive market, enterprises are required to continually review their suppliers, their supplier’s suppliers, their customers, their customer’s customers and constantly restructure and simplify their supply chain because they design and produce their products collaborating with a large number of suppliers and a little change in their suppliers, their supplier’s suppliers, or supplier’s competitors may affect their products up to their market share. For this case, it is very crucial for enterprises to develop a flexible supply chain management system (SCMS) to manage their supply chain effectively and efficiently and the management system has best integrated with others easily and components in the system loosely coupled while it is expediently to restructuring business and fabrication processes and procedures. Also, a supply chain management system may be integrated with legacy systems such as Customer Relation Management System which are relation to SCMS strongly for using assets fully.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an integrated software infrastructure and design approach to loosely coupled, protocol independent, standards-based distributed computing where delivering business functions as software resources available on the network are considered as shared services. Also, SOA is a good solution to integrate legacy systems, and is believed to become the future enterprise technology solution that promises the agility and flexibility the business users have been looking for by leveraging the integration process through composition of the services spanning multiple enterprises [3]. A supply-chain management system based on SOA satisfies the enterprises with the need for integrating process with their supplier and their customer agilely and flexibly.

This paper proposes a supply chain information system framework to support integrated with other systems conveniently. The proposed system uses web services to build web-based client interface

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and CORBA to integrate legacy systems.

2. Requirement

Marketing, distribution, manufacturing, and purchasing enterprises along the supply chain operate independently and have their objectives which are often conflicting. Supply chain management integrates these different functions to form a well-balanced and well-practiced relay team which is more competitive for each player in the team knows how to be positioned for the hand-off. For an enterprise, Plan, Source, Make, Deliver and Return are the five distinct management processes of it supply chain management though the processes of some enterprises are less than five, for example, a supermarket has no Make process. Figure 1 is a use-case diagram for a SCMS.

The Plan Process is composed of processes that balance aggregate demand and supply to develop a course of action which best meets sourcing, production and delivery requirements. It includes the supply chain plan, the source plan, the make plan and the deliver plan. The role employee includes decision-makers, managers and employees with simplifying the diagram. Supplier relations management and Customer relations management are looked as roles in this diagram because they aren’t discussed here. Employee make the supplier chain plan based on the information from CRM and SRM. The source plan, the make plan and the deliver plan are made according to the customer’s orders, sale of last year or the sale Strategy of the enterprise for different modes in source, make and deliver process.

employee CRM SRM supplier customer Return product return source return Deliver product Make Plan plan

source order order

Make Plan

Deliver Plan

Source

source

Source Plan

Figure 1 use-case diagram for a SCMS

The Source Process is composed of processes that procure goods and services to meet planned or actual demand. In the Source Process goods are purchased from suppliers with contracts meeting the sourcing plan made in the plan process or the actual demand.

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The Make Process is composed of processes that transform product to a finished state to meet planned or actual demand. In the Make Process products are made up with the sources obtained from the Source Process in term of the making plan in the plan process.

The Deliver Process is composed of processes that provide finished goods to meets planed or actual demand, typically including order management, transportation management, and distribution management. In the Deliver Process, customers put in orders, trace the order states, and monitor their own transportation and distribution information.

The Return Process is composed of processes associated with returning or receiving returned products for any reason. These processes extend into post-delivery customer support. In the Return Process, the returned products are put back for any reason by customers and a little of procure goods are returned to suppliers.

3. Analyze and Design

Plan, Source, Make, Deliver and Return and their relations are the center of analyze and design. The supply chain plan, the source plan, the make plan and the deliver plan are the four processes in the plan processes. For the supply chain plan process, data about customers, customer relations, suppliers, and supplier relations is required so that this process has associations with Supplier Relations Management and Customer Relations Management, shown as figure 1. But if they are tightly coupled, the detail of the other two systems must be known when you develop the third system and it is very difficult to integrate the three processes when different technologies were used. For this reason, a class diagram of the logical view about the plan process is drawn in figure 2: an interface of SRM and an interface of CRM for Supply are set to loosely couple the relation of supplier relation

Supply Chain Plan

(from Use Case View)

Make Plan

Suppliers Customers

MakeDeliverPlanInterface Deliver Plan SRM _InterfaceSRM

SourceMakePlanInterface

SupplyChainPlanInterface

Source Plan

PlanInterface

CRM CRM

Interface

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of supplier chain plan process to SRM and CRM, the source plan process, the make plan process and the deliver plan process use a shared interface SupplyChainPlanInterface to access the supply chain plan process and they afford suppliers and customers and other processes an interface to access. Interfaces are also used between the source plan process, the make plan process and the deliver plan process. By using Interfaces to access each other, the process function implementation is not cared by the related process function implementation and only the interfaces and the meanings of data must be consistent.

The source process, the make process, and the deliver process get relative plans from the plan process through interface PlanInterface. The source process has interface with the plan process, the make process, the deliver process, the return process and the supplier’s systems. Through the interface SupplierSourceInterface, source orders are put into supplier’s systems or fetch by supplier’s systems or suppliers, and the states of the source in supplier’s system are monitored by the source process. Figure 3 shows the interfaces, processes and their relations.

Interfaces are designed to integrate the processes in this design, and more interfaces are defined while detailing the processes and functions in the processes until the functions can not be divided or the functions were implemented by legacy systems. The interfaces between components deployed on

Make

MakeDeliverInterface SourceDeliverInterface SupplierSourceInterface PlanInterface CustomerDeliverInterface Deliver

Customer's System

DeliverReturnInterface Return

Supplier's System

Source

SourceReturnInterface

SourceMakeInterface

Figure 3 class diagram about source process, make process deliver process and return process

different computers are implemented services.

4. Implementation

Based on the design described above, components were designed to implement the functions required by the processes. Generally, four components supplier management system, plan system, execution monitor system and customer management system are built to manage the supplier chain of an

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enterprise. Supplier management system realizes purchasing goods and service automatically from procurement plan to payment for goods, and doing it according to the forecast through analyzing the procurement history; Plan system is an important phase and its aim is to balance the supply and need and let source, make, and delivery to collaborate congruously; Execution monitor system monitors the important processes in source, make, and delivery process in order to control the qualities and cost of the productions; Customer management system deals the all processes for customers including accepting orders，scheming production, transporting products and other services.

All of the four components are web-based applications and they can be deployed on the same web server or on different web servers. Supplier management system and customer management system share a security management modular and the other two share anther one for the users of the last two are from internet and these of the next two are from internal. Web services are used to realize business logics in the components so that the suppliers or customers can access the systems from either browser or programs. If they access the systems from programs, they can deal with their orders automatically through integrating their system with the two. The interfaces defined in analyze and design become the web service units. If some functions of the components were implemented by legacy systems, object request broker is used to enclose the legacy systems to offer services to be accessed by web services so that the legacy systems can be reused through integrating.

5. Conclusion

Supply chains play a vital role in the production of complex products made in the world today and one key to the successful management of these supply chains is integration. SOA supports all required types or "styles" of integration with loosely coupled, protocol independent, standards-based. It is a good solution to a multiple internet services scenario crossing multiple enterprises such as supply chain management. The proposed system can be integrated with legacy systems and systems of suppliers or customers conveniently so that it is agile and flexible enough for enterprises to rebuild their supply chains.

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References

[1]Ram Ganeshan Terry P. Harrison Department of Management Science and Information Systems http://lcm.csa.iisc.ernet.in/scm/supply_chain_intro.html

[2]http://www.supply-chain.org/page.ww?section=SCOR+Model&name=SCOR+Model

[3]http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/service-oriented_architecture_soa_definiti on.html

[4] Farhana Zulkernine http://www.cs.queensu.ca/home/cords/soa.ppt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

[5]http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid19_gci214546,00.html

[6] Shigeki Umeda and Albert Jones National Institute of Standards and Technology VIRTUAL SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: A RE-ENGINEERING APPROACH USING DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION http://www.mel.nist.gov/msidlibrary/doc/caracas.html

[7]S. Umeda, An object-oriented system model for manufacturing enterprise information system, 395-400, Proc. of APMS, IFIP WG5.7, 1996

[8]Arntzen, B. C., G. G. Brown, T. P. Harrison, and L. Trafton. Global Supply Chain Management at Digital Equipment Corporation. Interfaces, Jan.-Feb., 1995.

[9]Sang Shin’s Web services programming course http://www.javapassion.com/webservices [10]Dimple Sadhwani B2B Integration - A practical guide to collaborative e-commerce