Design Considerations for Building Distributed Supply Chain Management Systems Based on Cloud Computing

Abstract

Global manufacturing has extended the supply chain not only in span of networks and dispersion of geographical locations but also more importantly, it also transcends vast organizational boundaries among webs of long supply chains. Naturally, the information and computation technology (ICT) systems supporting these entities serve well on their own merits independently; however, the sharing of information among them in a responsive and agile and secure fashion is limited. The advent of cloud computing provides a distinct possibility to enhance sharing of information, to better apply modern analytic tools and to improve managing the controlled access as well as security. This paper is prepared to address the architectural issues of the data, analytics, and organizational layers.