Efficient Supply Chain Management via Federation-Based Integration of Legacy ERP Systems

The development of SCM systems is a difficult activity, since it involves integrating critical business flows both within and among participating companies. The inherently difficulty of the problem is exacerbated by the business constraint (that almost invariably applies in the real world) that the investments made by individual companies throughout the years must be preserved. This maps to major design constraints, since SCM systems must be built around the pre-existing ICT infrastructures of the individual companies and – also importantly – without affecting the local policies. We propose a federation-based approach to seamless and effective integration of legacy enterprise information systems into a unified SCM system. The proposed solution is implemented using a combination of Open Source BPM and ERP products, and validated with respect to a real world use case taken from a research activity (namely: the GLOB-ID project) conducted cooperatively by academic and industrial parties.