Turbulent markets need flexible supply chain communication

Abstract

This paper consists of three main sections. The first section discusses market turbulence and the transition from mass production to mass customization as driving forces for organizational change and optimization, which leads to IT-support and virtual enterprises. The second section describes the key-elements of supply chain management as one building block for virtual enterprises. Low-cost and flexible Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the key-enabler to automate the interactions between companies and their partners. In the third section, a complete concept and a prototype realization for Internet EDI-using XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is proposed. This approach is based on Internet and XML, because the implementation of traditional EDI (e.g. EDIFACT, ANSI X.12) is mostly too costly for small and medium sized enterprises, which has to be integrated as suppliers and customers in a supply chain. XML will be the international standard for Internet communication in the near future.

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