Supply Chain

Supply Chain Management (SCM) facilitates the exchange of goods, services, and information  between buyer and supplier organizations.  Though the participants in the supply chain are usually members of the same industry, and their IT departments process information dealing with similar subject matter,  B2B (business-to-business) communication is often hampered by the incompatability of the various systems involved.  Due to its modular design, installation and operation of ISS across enterprise boundaries is fundamentally the same as working within a single organization, so its unique integration capabilities can be easily utilized in the SCM environment.       

The diagram above illustrates a single enterprise implementation of ISS, used to integrate the information from the disparate systems of multiple supply chain partners.  In a more complex, “collaborative commerce” environment, the network may contain multiple, intersecting supply chains, with a different enterprise managing each chain.  Each managing enterprise can operate its own Information Sharing System and still maintain integrated information transfer throughout the collaborative network simply by sharing a common version of the universal semantic dictionary.