TABLE OF CONTENTS Santhosh Kumaran and Kumar Bhaskaran
Supply Chains are highly competitive and ultra responsive business models that integrate information and decision across all participants in an extended enterprise. In today's global economy, enterprises are changing continually, entering into new markets, encountering new competitors, introducing new products and restructuring themselves through mergers, acquisitions, alliances and divestitures. In order to stay competitive in such environments, enterprises require supply chain management solutions that are agile, responsive, resilient, and dynamic. Business process integration and management (BPIM) constitutes a set of technologies that serve as the foundation for creating such solutions. This paper presents a vision for the future supply chain systems, identifies the technical challenges in realizing this vision, and outlines a solution leveraging BPIM technologies.
We envision the future supply chains to be virtual enterprises "whose business processes integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers and customers can respond with flexibility and speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat" (Palmisano 2002). Disjointed processes, unaligned applications, and traditional communication channels, however, still burden a number of supply chains today. Bridging this gap will require supply chain solutions that support integrated processes, enable inter-operable applications, and provide unfettered access to heterogeneous data sources to present an end-to-end solution image. Any new supply chain solution must also carry forward the significant business investments in legacy applications and data sources, be flexible to accommodate changes in business processes through new integrated business functions, and enable collaboration across enterprise boundaries.
