Scalable Enterprise Systems: Scalable Information Framework for the Extended Business Enterprise

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This grant provides funding for the modeling, developing and prototyping of communication standards and interfaces that will support scalable, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Based upon an examination of a set of existing supply chains, a general model will be developed to represent a supply chain and the data needed to support transactions within the chain. Standards based upon XML will be developed for communication interfaces in a supply chain consisting of links that receive products from many suppliers in the chain and create products for many customers in the chain. Models will be constructed for representing not only linear relationships of suppliers, manufacturers and customers (supply chains) but also complex relationships that can only be represented as two-dimensional directed graphs (supply networks). The prototype software will be designed, developed and tested to determine how well the model supports operation of a small, sewn products (e.g. parachutes), supply network with scalability to a complex of military sewn products such as apparel, footwear, and chemical protective suits. Final scalability would support the entire set of supply networks of organizations providing consumable military products.Projections suggest the results of this research will lead to new features in ERP systems that currently support only internal operations of firms with common ownership or administration. Results of this project will influence the design of future ERP systems to incorporate business-to-business support for groups of cooperating, independently managed organizations (a virtual enterprise) that builds competitive advantage through collaboration. These new extended systems will reduce overall inventories in the supply network while, at the same time reducing stock outages in all supply network segments. The standards developed will facilitate the exchange of important information in the supply network and thus increase the velocity of both information and product flow between cooperating business entities.