A Case Study on Service Oriented Enterprise Interoperability in Automobile Supply Chain

Interoperability is an important issue in the supply chain management (SCM) systems that highly influence the productivity, especially in such complex automobile domain that many supplies take part in the activities and requirements are dynamically changed according to the market. In order to keep ahead in the competitive market, each enterprise in the supply chain should keep efficient interoperability with its partners. However, it is difficult for all of them to update their SCM systems in real time for collaboration especially for some small suppliers due to the expensive maintenance and complex technologies. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented approach to solve the above problem by providing an integrated platform, where interoperability is considered as utility-like capability and delivered in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS). Each enterprise in a supply chain could establish the interoperation activities with other partners in this platform and thus they could efficiently collaborate. We illustrate in detail how two SaaS-typed applications interact with each other. Yong Zhang Shandong University, China Shijun Liu Shandong University, China Yuchang Jiao IBM, China Yuqing Sun Shandong University, China