An Enterprise Architecture Approach for Designing an Integrated Wood Supply Management System

Introduction

The wood supply chains are commonly presented as a pipeline of activities starting on the raw material acquisition and ending on its delivery on the transformation centers, where the finish goods are produced according to the final clients’ specifications. They involve several companies, various business units inside the companies, many locations and consequently a paraphernalia of distinct information systems for planning and controlling the activities and information flows. Proprietary, client-tailored systems prevail, often without interfaces to other company’s systems nor interoperability features with other agents systems. Redundancy and data inconsistency problems are frequent and some transversal processes, such as products traceability along the chain, are difficult or even impossible to implement.

This chapter advocates the advantages of developing integrated computer-based approaches to support the management of the wood supply chain activities as well as the interactions among its agents. It further proposes an Enterprise Architecture approach for designing the Integrated Wood Supply Management System (iWS) with the involvement of the end-users.

The chapter is organized as follows: The background section provides the description of the Wood Supply Chain using as an example the Portuguese context. The currently adopted information systems are reviewed. An overview of the Enterprise Architecture (EA) methodologies is also presented. The following sections detail the applied EA road-map and its main results, namely, the hierarchical top-down Process Architecture, encompassing the Process Architecture framework and its individual business processes. The information entities described under the Information Architecture. The description of the iWS main modular components, driven from the CRUD matrix analysis in the course of the Applications Architecture. Finally, existing technologies that can adequately support the iWS modules as well as the technological requirements and developing guidelines, included on the Technological Architecture. The last sections are devoted to the discussion of future and emerging trends and presenting the concluding remarks.