A Federated Architecture to Support Supply Chains

A federation implies a loosely coupled system distributed across the internet or an intranet, where the participants can join in and leave the federation without breaking the federation. It also implies that participants can function on their own when they are not a part of the federation. This represents the reality of the supply chain member organizations who are independent businesses. While our business units operate in this fashion for various programs, our computer based systems do not. These businesses have their own business systems (PDM, ERP, Workflow, Schedulers, etc.) that cannot be dependent on systems of other organizations. In order to achieve the cost and cycle time benefits they need the capability to participate in multiple supply chains on an ongoing basis. The federated approach is inline with the current business trends and the goals of the modernization through spares initiatives. It provides a low risk alternative to existing technology investment strategies and enables organizations to bring new technologies in a modular fashion as opposed to the big bang approach. We have developed a COTS based federated architecture to support multiple, geographically distributed companies working together on programs that utilize innovative business practices afforded by the acquisition reform. A federated architecture enables programs to implement a total systems view and optimize their supply chains at a global level. This will reduce the cost and cycle time for programs. The key components of the architecture are (1) Federated Product Data Manager, (2) Federated Workflow Manager, and (3) Federated Production Planning and Scheduling. The paper discusses the architecture and the work done to date with commercial tools towards realizing this architecture.