ABSTRACT
An architecture proposal to support the collaborative production planning in a tree-based supply chain
The enterprise planning and management processes such as production, inventory level and resources capacities, have been always relevant topics of study. This due to the fact that not always is easy to meet, in an efficiently manner, the customers demand in terms of its required quantities, lead-times and quality. Thereafter, one solution to support these issues is by considering collaborative mechanisms or solutions. These will be oriented to carry out the main decision-making process among several companies. Further, by establishing these mechanisms rather than the traditional or non-collaborative ones, improvements in terms of the efficiency will be found. Nevertheless, from the technology integration point of view, the implementation of collaborative solutions in real environments is still considered a complex task. This complexity remains, on one hand, in the necessity of considering common standards to support the collaborative processes and, on the other hand, in to design and implement the right information flow among the supply chain companies or nodes to support their decision-making process.
In addition, two approaches can be linked to these collaborative solutions, such as the centralised and decentralised. In the first one, to lead a jointly decision-making process, all the supply chain nodes exchange all their information with a coordinator node. Then, this node makes the best decisions on behalf the whole supply chain in order to disseminate these to every node. In the second one, each node is responsible for exchanging its own information with others. This, according to some pre-agreed business rules, will lead to an independently decision-making process among the nodes. In either of these two approaches, the use of Frameworks is highly recommended to support the design and operations of the collaborative mechanisms. Some well known and accepted Frameworks in the research world and used in enterprise environments are the followings: Zachman, ARIS, TOGAF, DoDAF and ATHENA. These Frameworks provides the main modelling directions to support the information and communication technologies that held the design and implementation of the business supply chain processes.
In this context, this PhD thesis addresses the issue of designing and implementing collaborative processes under a decentralized supply chain approach. For this, the architecture SCACOP (Architecture for Collaborative Supply Chain Processes) is designed to support the implementation of collaborative mechanisms among companies. Further, SCACOP is based on the standard Zachman's Framework in terms of its perspectives and dimensions. Within this, the main data, functions, people, motivations, temporal and spatial relationship will be identified and defined. Thereafter, SCACOP supports the design and implementation of the most important collaborative supply chain processes, such as forecasting, order management, production planning, replenishment and product distribution. This allows SCACOP to be considered as a generic and adaptable architecture to model different supply chain topologies.
Finally, to validate the SCACOP architecture, the collaborative production planning has been designed and implemented in a decentralised tree-based supply chain topology. To support this, a tool based on one of the most important technologies for this purpose such as the multiagent systems has been selected. This technology is as robust tool for the decision-making, information flow and simulation modelling process, especially in supply chain environments. Furthermore, the results from the implemented tool highlights the fact that, by considering a collaborative approach, improvements in the service levels and profit rates for each node and the whole supply chain can be achieved against the traditional mechanisms.