E-business applications for supply chain management: challenges and solutions

Supply-chain management is a crucial activity in every company. Surprisingly, today, most of the supply-chain activities are carried out manually, and IT support is often limited to having a set of (disconnected) data repositories. In addition, business-to-business (B2B) communications are performed via phone, fax or e-mail. Increasing the operational efficiency of the supply chain results in huge savings and is the key to remaining competitive or even gaining a competitive advantage. Furthermore, a more efficient supply chain also enables revenue growth, which is often impossible to sustain with the current manual operations. In this paper, we discuss the requirements and challenges for e-business applications that support supply-chain management. Then, we propose an architecture that meets the requirements and enables solutions that deliver results quickly and that evolve with the business and IT environment. Both the requirements and the architecture are the results of several different types of supply-chain automation projects in which we have been involved