Enabling Supply-Chain Coordination: Leveraging Legacy Sources for Rich Decision Support

Abstract

As supply chains come under escalating pressure for responsiveness tocustomer demands as well as cost pressures, there is increased scope fordecision support models to enhance coordination of supply chainactivities. However, enhanced coordination implicitly requires sharinginformation about costs, production capacity, materials availability,delivery schedules, etc. This information is currently stored in apanoply of legacy information systems distributed across the many firmsthat comprise a given supply chain. As such, accessing usefulinformation presents considerable technical challenges, effectivelylimiting the deployment of decision support tools for supply chainoperations. The purpose of this chapter is to present the researchissues and approaches to accessing or integrating data in legacyinformation systems. Current industry approaches to informationintegration, including information hubs and Web Services technologies,are briefly reviewed and critiqued as useful but inadequate to the taskof integrating data stored in legacy systems. Recommended requirementsfor new methods include rapid deployment, ability to connect toheterogeneous legacy systems, composition of knowledge for decisionsupport, and provision for secure data access. These requirementsmotivate a review of the research literature on knowledge extraction andcomposition. As an example of new methods built from current research,an integrated toolkit known as SEEK: Scalable Extraction of EnterpriseKnowledge is presented. Capabilities and limitations of the SEEK toolkitare used to suggest novel areas of research in visualization andrepresentation of data for human refinement of automatic integrationresults, as well as further development of evolutionary algorithms toenhance the scope of automatic knowledge extraction. Throughout thechapter, an example of a construction industry supply chain is used tomotivate discussion.