Supply chain event management system

Abstract

The Supply Chain Management (SCM) can be defined as the set of proposals used to efficiently integrate suppliers, manufacturers and warehouses, such that the product is produced and distributed in the right quantity and at the right time, minimizing the total cost and satisfying the required service level (Simchi-Levi et al., 1999). To this aim, enterprises in a Supply Chain (SC) perform collaborative business processes (Soosay et al., 2008). Particularly, collaborative planning processes allow each enterprise to obtain production and/or distribution schedules synchronized with schedules of the other SC members (Derrouiche et al., 2008). In this chapter, a schedule is defined as a set of orders, where each order represents a supply process (production or distribution) that assigns materials to a place, states the required resources, the time period during which each resource is required and its required capacity. The execution of a schedule implies performing the operations defined in the supply process each order represents. As result of the uncertainty inherent in any supply process (Kleindorfer & Saad, 2005) disruptive events arise. The problems they cause during a schedule execution occur on a daily basis, and affect not only the organization where they are produced but also propagate throughout the SC (Lee et al., 1997; Radjou et al., 2002). That is, these disruptive events may affect the schedules and their synchronization. In this chapter a disruptive event is defined as a significant change in the order specifications or planned values of resource availability. These changes could be: rush or delay in the start or end date of the order, changes in the amount specified by the order, change in the expected future availability of a resource, and change into the current level of a resource regards to its planned value. They can be produced by changes that can take place into the enterprise or outside the enterprise. For example, an equipment breakdown, breakage of materials, change of material specification, weather conditions, traffic congestion, etc. The occurrence of disruptive events is a fact well known to the planning task, and therefore planning systems generate schedules including buffers (material, resource capacity and time) to be robust and flexible, thus the schedule can be adapted to conditions occurring during implementation (Van Landeghem & Vanmaele, 2002; Adhitya et al., 2007; Wang & Lin, 2009; Bui et al., 2009; Liu & Min, 2008). The occurrence of disruptive events during the schedule execution requires an adequate response. If the effect cannot be mitigated, an exception occurs. In this work an exception is defined as a deviation from the schedule that prevents the fulfillment of one or more orders that requires re-planning. Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) is defined as an event-based business process whereby significant disruptive events are recognized in time, reactive actions are quickly triggered, the flow of information and material are adjusted and key employees are immediately notified. The goal of SCEM is to enable the SC to respond to disruptive events avoiding the need to re-plan the operations of the SC. To support this business process, a new generation of event-based information systems, known as SCEM Systems (Masing, 2003; Zimmermann, 2006), has been proposed. This proposal emphasizes the necessity of exception-based management of the SC, supporting short term logistic decisions, avoiding complex cycles of re-planning, aimed at reducing the gap between the planning system and the execution of the schedules generated by it. In this chapter a proposal to systematically address the problem of disruptive event management in SC is described. Both academic and industrial researchers (Zimmermann, 2006, Radjou et al., 2002) have identified this problem as not being adequately covered by state of the art solutions in the SCEM systems. Moreover, the ability to automatically detect disruptions and repair them locally without affecting coordinated and coexistent schedules within a SC, is recognized to be a major competitive advantage in next generation of SCM systems.