E-Supply Chain Orchestration

Abstract

The world today is witnessing a growing interest in conducting supply chain business processes electronically. Different supporting technologies are emerging, and many are already available on the market. The adoption of these technologies is hampered by the fact that organizations constantly face new requirements, constraints and demands. Recent research has shown that service-oriented architectures and its supporting technology, Web services, can address many major issues encountered in complex supply chains. However, one of the largely unsolved issues is the orchestration of the variety of Web services in the supply chain. This chapter presents an investigation on orchestration of supply chain business processes using portals and Web service technologies. The portal-based orchestration concepts were carried out in a project for supporting end-to-end supply chain logistics in the United States Department of Defense. A second supply chain study looked at the added value of Web service orchestration.