Unicursal supply chain management for extending traceability from ordering to distribution and settlement

This paper presents a novel concept called "unicursal supply chain management" and describes its application in the Japanese retail industry. This concept enables the tracing of orders throughout the long continuous supply chain from the processes of ordering to distribution and settlement. This paper describes techniques to realize two essential features that comprise the unicursal supply chain, i.e., a cross-segment supply chain and order revision tracing. The cross-segment supply chain is a concept used for modeling business transactions initiated by ordering and completed by delivery and settlement as a single chain without breaks. Both conventional EDIs and more advanced B2B standards support business transactions independently for each segment of ordering, distribution, and settlement. Order revision tracing is a concept for management of the order changes that often occur at the boundaries of the segments and that have made order tracing across segments difficult or sometimes impossible in the past. This paper further describes the application of this concept to a real supply chain. We developed an experimental system based on these techniques and demonstrated a unicursal supply chain for the Japanese retail industry.