Semantic web-based supplier discovery system for building a long-term supply chain

As companies move forward to source globally, supply chain management has gained attention more than ever before. In particular, the discovery and selection of capable suppliers has become a prerequisite for a global supply chain operation. Manufacturing e-marketplaces have helped companies quickly and effectively discover new suppliers and/or buyers for their products and services. However, as the requirements and capabilities in isolation, their true meanings may not be uniformly interpreted by each other. The issue of semantics between suppliers and buyers, then, remains an obstacle. The main objective of this paper is to propose a semantic web-based supplier discovery system for building a long-term strategic supply chain. Specifically, (1) a key ontology is developed to represent the supplier’s capability information and the buyer’s requirements; (2) supplier’s potential capability is reasoned; and (3) and buyer’s requirements are semantically matched with supplier’s capability based on a similarity calculation. In order to build a long-term supply chain, the system receives supplier’s capability information composed of manufacturing capability, and non-manufacturing capability. The supplier’s non-manufacturing capability is evaluated considering information on the supplier’s finances, customers, internal business and learning and growth, based upon the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), which has been widely used to evaluate companies. In addition, a prototype for semantic web-based supplier discovery is implemented in order to demonstrate the practicality of the developed system.