Puay Siew Tan

Issues and Approaches to Dynamic, Service-oriented Multi-enterprise Collaboration

Businesses today form dynamic business alliances to meet short-term business goals. However, in traditional business-to-business integration (B2Bi), the connections are typically long term and static. This paper discusses the potential of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services in overcoming the issues and challenges of dynamic business partnerships. Some outstanding issues and challenges include the formulation of business processes for B2Bi at different levels of granularity and the dynamic composition, matching, selection and invocation of relevant services.

Multi-criteria decision techniques for context-aware B2B collaboration in supply chains

In todays rapidly changing environment, B2B collaboration technologies are crucial to support the growing complexity and diversity of supply chains. This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique, Deviation Measure, to support decision making in context-aware B2B collaboration. Empirical investigations to compare this proposed technique against other short-listed MCDM techniques were conducted. The completeness of ranking results, stability and robustness of the ranking sequence when new alternatives are introduced was investigated. The tests also examined the sensitivity of the sequence to changing weights in the criteria used. Results showed that the Deviation Measure technique is the best.

A secure RFID-based track and trace solution in supply chains

Supply chain traceability and visibility are key concerns for many companies. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is an enabling technology that allows identification of objects in a fully automated manner via radio waves. The EPCglobal Network is promoting a standardised way for using RFID technology through the use of inexpensive RFID tags and readers, The EPCglobal standard leverages on the pervasive Internet for effective information sharing of tracked items. This paper presents a research effort undertaken to design and develop a secure RFID-based track and trace solution in supply chains, by leveraging on the EPCglobal standard. When a product bearing a RFID tag goes through an EPCglobal-enabled supply chain, all the RFID events are captured and stored on EPCIS servers, which can be shared among other participants in the supply chain in a secured and controlled manner. To address security issues, two levels of security are investigated. One is at lower level, between reader and tag. The other is at higher business level, to control information sharing among participants of a supply chain based on a COT (Circle of Trust) concept. A prototype system is developed and discussed at the end of the paper to demonstrate its viability.

Supply Chain Visibility: A decision making perspective

The objective of this paper is to analyze supply chain visibility (SCV) which is ill-defined and to provide a comprehensive understanding of SCV from a collaborative decision making perspective. A literature review has been conducted to understand the meanings of the extensively used jargon of supply chain visibility. The characteristics of SCV have been conceptually analyzed and a comprehensive definition for it has been proposed to clear the confusion of its usages. SCV is a unique expression specific to the field of supply chain management and logistics. Currently, there are various definitions of which tackled different issues from different perspectives. A common definition/understanding of SCV can be induced after treating these definitions from a collaborative decision making perspective. A comprehensive understanding of SCV is beneficial to supply chain professionals to clearly communicate about SCV which is a critical issue for many companies keen to operate in an end-to-end environment. The definition of SCV presented in this paper is comprehensive and novel. It helps model and assess SCV for better supply chain decision making.

Key issues in manufacturing enterprise integration - the Singapore perspective

This paper discusses the outcome of a survey to ascertain the level of business integration among selected manufacturing companies in Singapore, the issues encountered in the process, and the extent of IT adoption. Generally speaking, the level of intra-enterprise integration among small and medium-sized companies is not as advanced as those of larger corporations. The reasons for these are discussed. The large corporations were the key drivers behind inter-enterprise integration because of the sheer trading volumes and the multiplicity of suppliers. The issues confronting enterprise integration are discussed in relation to the planning, roll-out and post implementation phases. Three preferred modes of IT adoption to effect B2B integration are discussed. Finally, the role of ICT solutions and standards in promoting enterprise integration are presented.

High-level Business Processes for Agile B2B Collaboration

Increasingly, more businesses are collaborating to leverage on the competencies of potential partners in furtherance of common goals. Although best sourcing is the mantra of the day, many businesses are finding it more efficacious to form business alliances supported by IT-enabled business processes.

A Context Model for B2B Collaborations

Context-awareness (CA) has been applied in different domains, particularly in ubiquitous computing, to provide better value-added services. CA has also been used, albeit sporadically, in business related applications. This paper discusses an on-going research effort in enhancing Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations through context awareness, specifically to support the formation of short and dynamic connectivity between partners collaborating in a supply chain. Through an understanding of context awareness and how companies evaluate and select prospective suppliers, a B2B Context Model is proposed to discover and match suitable partners. The prospective partners are represented as services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm.

An Ontology to Support Context-Aware B2B Services

In present day globalised trade, the ability to support collaboration through B2B (Business-to-Business) services is crucial. One of the key challenges is to pervasively connect partners across the entire value chain, with the appropriate service offerings. Thus, it is vital to quickly identify potential partners to form new B2B collaborations or to support formed collaborations with swift decision making abilities. This paper proposes the use of Description Logic (DL) based reasoning to ensure completeness and decidability in reasoning for context-aware B2B services. A B2B Context Model is realised through a DL-based representation language called OWL (Web Ontology Language). The expressivity of OWL was extended through the SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language), to represent business rules identified in the model. The performance scalability of an ontology-based knowledge base using OWL was then investigated. Results showed that such a knowledge base is not scalable.

Multi-criteria, context-enabled B2B partner selection

B2B collaborations today are typically short-term and dynamic, so it is imperative that business processes be quickly and accurately forged. This paper details research that combines both the context-aware (CA) approach and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique to select and rank potential partners in context-enabled B2B collaborations. The approach was validated by a case study. A review of context-aware applications and the criteria for the selection of potential partners are also presented.

Context-enabled B2B Collaborations

Traditional ways of collaboration among enterprises are no longer adequate and efficient due to increasingly short cycle times and constantly changing business circumstances. Companies compete as value chains using Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations based on infocomm technologies, in particular the Internet. Most B2B collaborations are typically long term and static but are pushing towards short term and dynamic connectivity. This paper introduces a context-aware framework to support such short and dynamic B2B collaborations. In this framework, context information in terms of the user (company), temporal and location information is then used to match of suitable services to realize the business processes formed for B2B collaborations. An initial implementation of this approach is presented together with proposed improvements.