iSURF

To be able to cope with the requirements of today’s competitive and demanding digital world of business, companies, especially SMEs, need to be more agile, and be ready to react to the changing requirements of the sector. This requires a better view and a more comprehensive analysis of the whole marketplace. Trading partners within a supply chain usually have different competencies based on their business strategies and varying sources of information. When this information is not shared, the decision making capability of companies is reduced since the impact of a decision on the supply chain as a whole cannot be assessed correctly. An environment needs to be created to facilitate the collaborative exploitation of this distributed intelligence of multiple trading partners in order to better plan and fulfil the customer demand in the supply chain.

As a response to this need, the iSURF project provided a knowledge-oriented inter-enterprise collaboration environment to SMEs to share information on the supply chain visibility, individual sales and order forecast of companies, current status of the products in the manufacturing and distribution process, and the exceptional events that may affect the forecasts in a secure and controlled way.

In addition to coordinating the project, SRDC Team was the main R&D partner of the project. Our achievements can be summarized as follows:

• Development of the Service Oriented Collaborative Supply Chain Planning Process Definition and Execution Platform based on “CPFR®” guidelines
• Development of the Semantic Interoperability Service Utility (ISU) for achieving the semantic reconciliation of the planning and forecasting business documents exchanged between the companies according to different standards
• Development of the Transitory Collaboration Service Utility (TCSU), for establishing transitory and dynamic collaboration agreements between trading partners.
• 2 PhD, 3 Msc theses and several publications