Abstract

Managing a supply chain is one of the most complicated tasks today when erratic changes in demand must be met as soon as possible for staying competitive, while dealing with multitude of business partners that are involved in the chain. It is imperative that any changes in a corporation's product/service demand be immediately communicated with its suppliers and logistic service providers. This task of communication has long been overtaken by computerized systems from the telephones and fax machines. The computer technologies being used so far to connect two businesses are proving to be too rigid in today's world of mergers, acquisitions, new business deals etc which bring in the task of tying the disparate computer systems of these different organizations. To solve this problem, the enterprise software industry has developed new standards and a new design for constructing inter-organization applications, collectively known as the Web Service technology.

This paper demonstrates how this technology works and how it can be applied to the problem of supply chain management. This paper describes the principles of Web Services and its features like UDDI. A demonstrative supply chain infrastructure is created using the Web Service technology which shows the ease of creating new communication links with new supply chain partners without having to invest in costly computer technology resources. The paper will show that the adoption of Web Services and adoption of standard business language OAGIS will make the task of supply chain communication as easy as plug and play.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Industrial management--Data processing; Web services; Supply and demand

Publication Date

1-2005

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Department, Program, or Center

Industrial and Systems Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Sudhakar Paidy

Advisor/Committee Member

Moises Sudit

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Plan Codes

ISEE-MS

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