Dongsoo Kim

An integrated supply chain management system: a case study in healthcare sector

This research has designed and developed an integrated supply chain management (SCM) system for optimizing inventory control and reducing material handling costs of pharmaceutical products in healthcare sector. The supply chain in this work is composed of pharmaceutical companies, a wholesaler, and hospitals. At first, we have analyzed hospitals business processes and reviewed system requirements for the efficient supply chain management. VMI (Vendor-Managed Inventory), which is one of important applications of SCM, has been adopted and implemented to improve material handling efficiency. Online procurement system is also developed for the departments that consume drugs and place orders. Besides, real time information sharing functionalities are provided for optimizing inventory control of pharmaceuticals. The developed SCM system enables hospitals to improve the procurement processes and inventory control of pharmaceutical products, which results in decreasing total inventory more than 30%. By sharing information with hospitals, the wholesaler can gather more timely and exact data about inventory status and drug usage volumes of hospitals, so it can forecast the demand more accurately, which enables needed products to be supplied timely and cost-effectively. With the SCM system, total supply chain cost of pharmaceutical products has been decreased significantly.

Development of an ebXML Conformance Test System for e-Business Solutions

This research has designed and implemented a standard conformance test system for e-Business solutions that support the ebXML, which is currently being focused on as the leading electronic commerce framework. The adoption of standards such as ebXML is probably the best way to achieve interoperability among electronic commerce systems, and more and more e-Business solutions around the world are supporting ebXML. This work primarily discusses the concept and needs for the standard conformance tests on e-Business solutions. The standard conformance test system is developed based on the detailed specifications of the ebXML framework. This system has been used to test commercial e-Business solutions. The system implemented in this research will provide a significant basis for the standard conformance certification of e-Business solutions, and could also provide clear decision criteria for e-Business solutions currently in market, thus activate the overall e-Business market.

Building a RosettaNet-based e-Logistics Automation System

RosettaNet consortium is an international e-business standardization organization working for establishing industry-wide, open e-business standards. Since its launch in June 1998, it has become one of the most leading e-business standard bodies in automating supply chain processes, particularly in the industries such as electronics and semiconductors. RosettaNet consortium is making efforts to extend its standard to cover more various industry sectors and businesses. The e-logistics program is such an effort to apply RosettaNet framework to logistics domain. The RosettaNet PIP is a business process standard that specifies the unit tasks of a business activity between trading partners. As PIPs are fine-grained to clearly describe each business activities without redundancy, multiple PIPs should be collectively used to implement high-level business scenarios. In this research, we seek to design and implement a RosettaNet-based e-logistics system that executes and manages multiple PIPs to automate logistics processes. By applying the e-logistics system to a real world business that incorporates third-party logistics, we have verified the flexibility of our system for managing and controlling business processes composed of multiple PIPs.

A modeling framework of business transactions for enterprise integration

A modeling framework and an integration platform for unifying B2Bi (Business to Business integration) and EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) systems are required to effectively manage collaborative B2B business processes. In this research, we suggest a modeling framework for enterprise integration. The suggested framework includes various activity controllers derived from several business process modeling standards. An extension mechanism is included in the suggested framework for incorporating future changes in those standards or systems operational requirements. The modeling framework has been implemented as a real business integration platform and runs successfully in production systems to execute enterprise B2B collaborations.