Research And Development Of Supplier Collaboration Model And System Based On Service Oriented Architecture

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) is one of the most im-portant applications of enterprise resource management. Well controlled SRM can reduce the total cost of the enterprise whole value chain, and improve the manufacturing reaction speed and efficiency. The relationship between Customers and Suppliers always exists inside each business scenarios along the whole supply chain. In order to meet the rapid change and kinds of customized requirements from customers, enterprises nowadays must enhance the closer cooperation with their suppliers to re-alize any change from requirements. But the huge difference such as dif-ferent geographic locations, different management and IT infrastructure levels, makes the relationships between these business partners much more complex and harder to manage. Problems from either customer side or supplier side may cause the whole business fail. But till now, the man-agement of supplier relationship still only focuses on suppliers'manage-ment, which means remaining suppliers database control level, in-put-store-reuse these information, and let purchaser use these static elec-tronic data inside the enterprise. As the base of enterprise manufacturing and operation, exactly and timely exchange information with suppliers to improve the cooperation is the key point for relationship management. We hope the supplier management could be able to manage the cooperation of both sides regarding the business process requirements, which means the'Supplier Relationship management'level.In this article, we made the research and development as following:1. We analyzed the characters and advantages of different kinds of supplier collaboration patterns. Then we discussed the SOA theory, especially studied the ESA platform technology pro-vided by SAP.2. Further more, we researched different work flows from SOA technology point of view and designed the related collaboration actions definitions and transformation methods. We applied SOA ways and means to build the models, and introduced SAP ESA platform technology to design the supplier collaboration system, including Request for Quotes collaboration, Contract collaboration, Purchase Order collaboration, Goods Receipt collaboration and Invoice collaboration, etc.3. Finally, we recommended the Key Performance Indicator ana-lytic method, which has been used in enterprise management, to collect the key business figures of the implemented company to optimize the developed system.The supplier collaboration system developed based on SOA is able to enable the integration of different collaboration ways for supplier man-agement. It can solve the developing effort and system maintenance problems which brought by different information management systems, fire walls and IT infrastructure change. At the same time, it will shorten the period of implementation and maintenance across companies and systems, so reduce the total cost of ERP implementation and maintenance.