Open source supply chains

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems tend to deploy Supply Chains (SC), in order to successfully integrate customers, suppliers, manufacturers and warehouses, and therefore minimize systemwide costs while satisfying service level requirements. Although efficient, these systems are neither versatile nor adaptive, since newly discovered customer trends cannot be easily integrated. Furthermore, the development of such systems is conformed to strict licensing, since the exploitation of such kind of software is most of the times proprietary. This leads to a monolithic approach and to sub-utilization of efforts from all sides. Introducing a completely new paradigm of how primitive Supply Chain Management (SCM) rules apply on ERP systems, the developed framework is an Open Source MAS that introduces adaptive intelligence as a powerful add-on for ERP software customization. In this paper the SCM system developed is described, whereas the expected benefits of the open source initiative employed are illustrated.