Supply Chain & Business Ecosystem Apps

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The FITMAN “Supply Chain & Business Ecosystem Apps” Specific Enabler (FITMAN-SCApp) is a web-based application for exploiting ecosystem Tangible and Intangible Assets in relation with application in Collaborative Capacity Scheduling and Team Building. This assets work in strict cooperating with the FITMAN “Collaborative Asset Management” Specific Enabler (FITMAN-CAM), a web-based, integrated platform for the management of Virtualized Assets in the scope of service-oriented Manufacturing Ecosystems.

The collaboration among supply chain or business ecosystem partners is a key aspect in order to exploit the potentialities of Virtual Factories. Every time there is a business opportunities a company should decide to manage it alone or to exploit the network partners. To collaborate is anyhow necessary to have information about which partner has the ability to do a task and the availability of resources to accomplish it. Only if the right information about partners are managed is possible, for a Virtual Factory, to quickly and easily involve other subjects in the process. The goal of the Specific Enabler “Supply Chain & Business Ecosystem Apps” is to provide two major functionalities:

• Collaborative Production Capacity Planning to allow the sharing of manufacturing services in the network based on partners’ tangible assets (eg: machineries) exposed as a service
• Team Building to allow the composition of a team based on individual skills of people (companies intangible assets) exposed as a service.

 

The FITMAN “Supply Chain & Business Ecosystem Apps” Specific Enabler (FITMAN-SCApp) is a web-based application for the exploitation of Tangibble and Intangible services. Both application based on Tangible (machineries capacities) and Intangible (people skills) assets are based on a set of gadgets communicating each other. Behind these human interfaces, a set of services allows to manage data offering allt eh needed functionalities. The different end-users (who is looking for machineries services and who is offering capacities) will access differently to the interface and will have the possibility to discuss synchronous or asynchronous with other end-users.
This application will help Virtual Factories in improving collaboration among network partners sharing knowledge across partners minimising the effort required to get information.
Main features of FITMAN-SCApp are the following:

1. Production Capacity Planning
   1. Machineries Search
   2. Look at machinery details
   3. Master Production Scheduling Loading and Visualisation
   4. Management of Virtual Rooms (CRUD)
   5. Virtual Room for discussion
   6. Export of UBL2.0 documents (RfQ, Quotation, Production Order, etc.)
2. Team Building
   1. People Search
   2. Look at people skills
   3. Management of Virtual Rooms (CRUD)
   4. Virtual Room for discussion
   5. Export of UBL2.0 documents

The FITMAN-SCApp Specific Enabler is an extension of the MSEE Value Added Applications. Having collaboration as objective the approach is to be extensible as much as possible; so open social gadgets have been choosen as technology. GUI can be deployed in any online container supporting open social gadget like Apache Shindig, Liferay portal server, etc. that can be accesed by users of a distributed organization, such as Virtual Enterprises in the typical Virtual Factory scenario.
The architecture of the solution is visible here below:

1. FITMAN SEI_4 “Collaborative Asset Management” Specific Enabler (FITMAN-CAM) provides the storage and basic functionalities to manage Tangible and Intangible Assets
2. In the Database are stored all the information needed to manage the applications like virtual rooms, status of discussions, generated documents, etc.
3. The service layer is composed by both SOAP and REST web services providing the functionalities needed by the applications.
4. Gadgets providing the GUI for the major functionalities required.
5. The container level composes and manages the different gadgets.