DESIGN OF REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR COLLABORATION IN SUPPLY CHAIN

Abstract

This research has been taken up for designing an information framework and subsequently, a reference architecture that facilitates collaboration, an important aspect of supply chain management. The study has been done in the context of multinational manufacturing corporations operating in India. Collaboration in supply chain partners needs effective sharing of information between the organizations. This requires integration of information technology (IT) based systems of the partnering organizations, which evolve rapidly in size and complexity due to dynamism in the business environment. The complexity of the information systems can be attributed to the increasing demand regarding the functional and non-functional requirements and intelligent behavior of the systems (such as event based alerts). These information systems, in the form of software solutions are often developed by different software vendors and are integrated into a single solution at a later stage which augments the complexity. As these systems belong to more than one organization, they need to communicate in a heterogeneous and distributed environment, placing high demands on interoperability. The information systems complexity caused by continuous evolution of the field and the need of interoperability for integration of disparate systems has motivated this research for developing a comprehensive information framework that facilitates collaboration in a supply chain and subsequently, an appropriate newline