Design and development of a service-oriented supply chain: An IT perspective

Aimed at creating more potentials and entailing highly profitable service-oriented businesses, enterprises have been shifting gears towards delivering superior services as ultimate outcomes. Different from the traditional value chain business models leveraged through product-driven transactional type collaborations, service-oriented business practices require a more rigorous approach incorporating technological (computer science and engineering), business (organization and management), demand (economics and markets) and social (sociological and cognitive science) innovations [3]. As a groundbreaking study, this IBM SUR (Shared University Research) project focuses on the exploration of a practical approach to enabling a platform to demonstrate the concept of service-oriented value nets. Expanded from our previous report [7], this paper gives a more comprehensive discussion of our research and development results at the system level. The sponsored project essentially showcases service-oriented value networks established using IBM WebSphere solutions. © 2007 IEEE.