Improving Supply Chain Operations Performance by Using a Collaborative Platform Based on a Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract

Every new technology promises to solve a lot of problems inside companies and to achieve unforeseen performance improvements. Nowadays, Service-Oriented Architectures begin to be promoted as new balsam where companies may realize their visions and put all their new strategies in practice. Initially focused on intra-organizational integration efforts, they begin to be used when supporting inter-organizational business processes engineering in networked organizations. Although these kinds of initiatives in most of cases are lead by major companies, the INPREX project (Spanish acronym for Interoperability in Extended Processes), here presented falls out this category. By contrast, this is an undergoing initiative leaded by a Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) and founded by a local government in Spain. In this work, we introduce the IDIERE Platform which has been designed for supporting three major requirements of networked enterprises: openness, flexibility and dynamism when deploying and executing distributed business processes