Web service intelligent agent structuring for supply chain management (SCM)

Because of the ease of deployment and other properties like standard communication mechanisms, there is a trend in the industry to migrate to Web services. Legacy applications are being replaced or complimented by Web services so that they can be integrated in the Enterprise IT infrastructure as well as with other business partners. Supply chains for organizations have many inefficiencies resulting is higher end product costs. Traditional supply chain architecture is less agile and is unable to configure automatically due to ever changing business environment or business needs, in other words we can say it is not adaptive in nature. We propose an agent structure, which can be used to overcome the above mentioned problems thus giving more agility to supply chain. We focus on two aspects of supply chain management. Removing inefficiencies in supply chains by real time knowledge sharing and automated supply chain configuration by negotiating methods being used by agents. The above infrastructure is deployed on Web services which is not only easier to implement but also takes care of the problems of legacy application connectivity and inter and intra organizational communication.