Flow-Based Supply Chains

This paper proposes a multilevel flow model of supply chains that reflects new requirements for interconnected flows of material, information, and money. The internal organization of each sphere is an assembly of five areas - collection, processing, creation, release, and communication - that form stages of internal streams of flow. To illustrate the applicability of the model, an application is discussed in terms of a high-level description proposed by the Web services interoperability organization as a standard case model for supply chain management.