PROJECT PROPOSAL REPORT

SUPPLY CHAIN INTEGRATION TO THE INTERNET

Gökçe Banu Laleci http://www.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~e112900

Sunay Yaldiz http://www.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~e1097914

Yildiray Kabak http://www.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~e109750

Müge Çavdaroglu http://www.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~e112871

Department of Computer Engineering,

Middle East Technical University

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Asuman Dogaç

Senior Design Project and Seminar, CENG490

Coordinator: Dr. Ferda N. Alpaslan, Dr. Volkan Atalay

Teaching Assistant: Gürkan Özhan, Özgür Alan

Date: 6.10.2000

Motivation and Purpose:

Continuous improvements on the information technologies and the communication systems together with people's level of education, the ability of covering most of our needs without going to shops, accepting the internet as a part of our lives created a new market called e-commerce. The goal of economic commerce and the improvements of the people's life standards have supported the strategic place of e-commerce. It is necessary to arrange economical, legal, efficient and financial systems to support e-commerce. There are several architectures implemented in order to facilitate e-commerce. Workflows, supply chains , data storage methods are some of the important areas to walk through. in order to serve the aims of e-comerce. And developing a combined system of these three keywords is the goal of our project.

Project Description:

Electronic commerce is happening at a very fast pace and business to business, e-commerce is taking the lead, a ver important part of which is the supply chain integration and automation. The realization of this fact provided the base idea of our project. We will design a system that will automate the supply chain and integrate it into the internet. The automation of processes on the supply chain will inolve the following; whenever a product is bought, this information should propagate down and up the supply chain automatically triggering a series of distribution, manufacturing and logistic events. In order to provide these facilities we will implement proper applications. We will define a workflow including the necessary activities. To integrate the supply chain scenario to the internet, the orders and the invoices among the parties will be exchanged via mails incuding the necessary documents. These content of documents retailers, distributors and manufacturers is supposed to be generic. In rder to provide the inteoperability we recommend the usage of XML. Interchanging of docs introduced to XML will be very helpful in dealing with docs maintained in database or applications.

Statement of the Work to be performed

We will try to reflect the current design of our project. We will give some brief information about the structure.

We aim to implement supply chain automation for an application domain consisting of retailer, distributors and manufacturers. Whenever a customer order occurs an automated stock control will be performed in the retailer party. Here it is essential that a "stock danger level"(SDL) (which could be zero) must be associated with each item in stock and a triggering mechanism must be available raising a signal, if "in_stock_quantity" of a product goes below a stock danger level. This triggering mechanism is needed to automatically enact the related workflows to generate an order to purchase (or produce) the missing item.

If customer order cannot be satisfied in the retailer object of the workflow, the order will propagate down the distributors with an automatically triggered order mechanism. The order will be sent to the distributors in parallel.

Another point is that, while giving an order a minimum order quantity should be considered. That is a part cannot go ahead and order any amount it needs to replenish its stock but needs to order a prespecified amount, called MOQ.

The distributors handle the request of the retailer just as the retailer handles the order of the customer. Considering SDL and MOQ constraints, either it satisfies the order of the retailer or the order is propagated down to the manufacturer.

Whenever a partner satisfies the order of the demanding partner, it generates an invoice and an electronic message should be sent to the buyer confirming the acceptance of the transaction.

In the above scenario, the communication between the parties, i.e. giving the order and sending the invoices is established by document transferring. XML is used in our architecture as an enabling technology since it makes it possible for business document, forms and messages to be interoperable and comprehensible. In our project the transfer mechanism, workflow definition and the assignment of applications related to the tasks of the parties, to the activities of the workflow will be provide by using the MARIFlow facilities.

Mariflow is an architecture that provides for automating and monitoring the flow of control and document over the Internet among different organizations. MARIFlow describes a system that can be applied to any business practice where data flow and invocation of activities among different industries and cooperations follow a pattern that can be described through a process definition. MARIFlow provides the process definition tool that helps the definition of the control flow and the assignment of applications to the activities. Activities make use of the data and can be specified according to the selected business practice. The specification is possible by making the appropriate application implementation and accurate integration.

By using this facilities we will create the proper workflow definition, determine the necessary activities of our supply chain, and make the suitable assignment of the applications, which will be implemented according to the needs of the parties.

Current State of the Art in Turkey and in the World

E-commerce in all over the world keeps increasing in parallel of the increase of Internet users. In the Internet and the e-commerce area North America countries are the firs ones. The West European-Scandinavian and the Asia-Pacific countries follow the first group. It is clear that more the users feel confident; the more it will be widely used. Nowadays Turkey realized the importance of e-commerce and started to develop commercial systems for various applications. But they can’t keep up with the current technology and provide the current standards of the world yet.

The most notable work on supply chain automation and integration came from two main industry consortiums. CommerceNet consortium n RoettaNet consortium. The COMMERCENet is leading the industry association for electronic commerce and they described the required properties for supply chain integration. RosettaNet on the other hand stresses the importance of open content and open transaction standard for supply chin integration and is producing the standard description for the computer industry as XML DTDS.

A more recent electronic commerce interoperability infrastructure proposed by CommerceNet is the eCo framework. In the eCo framework business agree a common method of describing what they do, rather than the standards of what they do and how they do it.

WISE system describes an infrastructure for business-to-business electronic commerce. This infrastructure includes an "internet workflow engine" acting as the underlying distributed operating system controlling the execution of the business processes, a process modeling tool for defining and monitoring the processes, a catalog tool for virtual enterprise services.

Approach and Method to be used:

Our summer practice provided us an introductory information about the concepts which will constitute the infrastructure of our project. This introductory information includes the java programming language, MARIFlow project, the importance of e-commerce. We preferred java as programming language for our project since it is the most suitable language for internet applications.Its object oriented structure will provide us to get the help of MARIFlow project for the supply chain to the internet. It was very important to comprehend the structure of te MARIflow project in order to plan the design of the integration. Since we all inspected the code of it, read related documents and deliverables bout the projct, understood the installation and configuration and tested various scenarios, we easily made plans for combination.

Major Milestones:

There are two major milestones. The first one is at 10^th November. A progress report will be submitted. The second milestone is at 15^th December. A final report will be submitted.

Coarse Project Plan and Schedule:

Work Packages

WP1: Analysis of the project and design phase will take 5 weeks.

WP2: Coding, testing of modules, integration of modules and general testing will take 6 weeks.

Work Package Breakdown

WP1: Analysis of the project and design phase will take 5 weeks.

• Task1: Understanding the scope of the project, as a whole will take 1 week.

  Task2: Analysis of the retailer and distributor modules will take 1 week.

  Task3: Analysis of the manufacturer, and DB and XML modules will take 1 week.

  Task4: Design of the retailer and distributor modules will take 2 weeks.

  Task5: Design of the manufacturer, and DB and XML modules will take 2 weeks.

  Task6: Report writing will take 1 week.

WP2: Coding, testing of modules, integration of modules and general testing will take 6 weeks.

Resources

In all parts of the project, Java programming language will be used as the programming environment.

Yildiray KABAK and Sunay YALDIZ will develop retailer and distributor modules. Gokce Banu LALECI and Muge Hayriye CAVDAROGLU will develop manufacturer, and DB and XML modules.

Schedule

Task sheet