Diversified SCM standard for the Japanese retail industry

• Authors: Koichi Hayashi;Naoki Koguro;Reki Murakami
• Venue: WWW '05 Special interest tracks and posters of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web
• Year: 2005

In this paper, we present the concept of a diversified SCM (supply chain management) standard and distributed hub architecture which were used in B2B experiments for the Japanese retail industry. The conventional concept of B2B standards develops a single ideal set of business transactions to be supported. In contrast, our concept allows a wide range of diverse business transaction patterns necessary for industry supply chains. An industry develops a standard SCM model that partitions the whole supply chain into several transaction segments, each of which provides alternative business transaction patterns. For B2B collaboration, companies must agree on a collaboration configuration, which chooses the transaction alternatives from each segment. To support the development of a B2B system that executes an agreed collaboration, we introduce an SOA (service oriented architecture) based pattern called a distributed hub architecture. As a hub of B2B collaboration, it includes a complete set of services that can process every possible business transaction included in a standard SCM model. However, it does not function as a centralized service that coordinates participants. Instead, it is deployed on every participant and executes the assigned part of the supply chain collaboratively with other distributed hubs. Based on this concept, we analyzed actual business transactions in the Japanese retail industry and developed a standard SCM model, which represents more than a thousand possible transaction patterns. Based on the model, we developed an experimental system for the Japanese retail industry. The demonstration experiment involved major players in the industry including one of the largest general merchandise stores, one of the largest wholesalers, and major manufacturers in Japan.