Agile Information Systems for Mastering Supply Chain Uncertainty
Read this chapter. The main objective of this reading is to identify the different strategies and characteristics of supply chains. Pay attention to Figure 1 and the explanation for each. What types of companies do you think use Agile supply chains which deal with evolving and highly innovative products?
Conclusions
The main objectives of this chapter were to
define the requirements to information systems in agile supply chains
and to develop strategies for implementation of agile information
systems.
The chapter has first introduced a typology of supply
chain strategies and the role of information systems in these
strategies.The type of supply chain determines the required flexibility
of front- and back-office systems. Efficient supply chains require
stable, straight-forward planning systems for both front-office and
back-office. Risk-hedging supply chains require the same type of stable
front-office systems as efficient supply chains do. However, they
require flexible back-office systems, integrated with production control
systems and supplier's systems. Responsive supply chains place high
demands on the ability to combine fluctuations in demand and available
supplies with respect to product specifications and lead times. Agile
supply chains require flexibility in both front-office and back-office
systems. They demand flexible ERP in the back-office and sophisticated
configurator and customer communications systems in the front-office.
Next,
the chapter has focused on information systems in the quadrant of agile
supply chains. It is argued that these supply chains information
systems should support an ICT mass customisation approach. ICT mass
customisation combines the seemingly contradictory notions of efficient
standard software and flexible customised software. It enables
customer-specific assembly of information systems from a repository of
standard components. Five requirements for the enhancement of ICT mass
customisation have been defined:
a) generic information model, b) modular
software, c) information integration platform, d) configuration
support, and e) component availability.
In the next section the
role of ERP systems, configurators and SOA to enable ICT mass
customisation is defined. None of these technologies completely satisfy
the defined requirements, but together they could enable ICT mass
customisation. ERP can ensure availability of the software modules in a
repository of building blocks that form the heart of mass customizable
information systems. However, the development towards modularized and
service-oriented ERP is a crucial prerequisite to achieve this.
Furthermore, configurators can provide the configuration support as
required in mass-customisable information systems. It helps to elicit
the required functionality of specific instantiations of information
systems building upon a generic information model. Last,
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) can help to meet, in particular, the
requirements concerning software modularity and it provides an
information integration platform.
The chapter concludes with the
introduction of three basic strategies for the implementation of agile
information systems. The strategies involve different divisions of
product configuration, process configuration and management of the order
fulfilment among ERP systems, dedicated configurator software and SOA
platforms. All of the strategies entail order-specific configuration of
the process model. The strategies differ in the technology to be used
for that purpose and the location of the knowledge required for process
configuration. The first strategy is to implement intelligent process
configuration in the middleware that mediates between front-office
systems (sales and product configurators) and back-office (ERP) systems.
This approach would require a considerable advancement of the
state-of-the-art in service composition. The second strategy is to
include process configuration in the product configurator, thus enabling
simultaneous configuration of product and process. This second approach
would require the extension of current product configurators. Since
process configuration depends on current and expected state of the
back-office, it would also entail extensive and frequent information
exchange between front-office and back-office systems. The third
strategy is to implement order specific process configuration in the
back-office ERP system. The latter strategy would avoid redundancy of
process knowledge, but many current ERP systems do not support the
modular process modelling approach and the dynamic configuration support
required to realise this strategy. The first or the second strategy
might be preferred depending on (among other factors) the extent of
supply uncertainty in a particular branch of industry.