Entwurf und Implementierung einer Rich Internet Application zur Visualisierung von Supply Chain Prozessen

The globalization of markets characterized by increasing networking of economy due to the rapid developments in information and communication technology, result in a strong competition of worldwide producing companies. At the same time, companies face challenges evented by individual products, short production times and high product quality. Therefore, a change on the market took place in recent years where the companies apply to alternative production systems. In the past products have been built to stock (BTS), today however there is a movement towards a customer-oriented manufacturing (build-to-order, BTO). This requires planning fundamentally refocuses on production and logistics which are highly complex supply chain processes, composed of numerous sub-processes and where munch information of globally distributed sides centrally converge result. To handle this amount of information the companies currently use various slides and spreadsheets and documents or personally meetings in project rooms. The practices and the nature of the procedures may differ relative to historically different grown structures of individual sides and departments. The distributed and heterogeneous representation of the complex interactions reduce transparency and hamper the understanding of processes. The manual examination of multiple scenarios of changing market situations for business management of logistics is also too complicated and thus the needed flexibility not given. Now, these problems should be solved by a specialized software solution for standardized visualization of supply chain processes. A technology which offers an interesting approach is the new technology of the Rich Internet Applications (RIA). RIAs are a new kind of web-based applications, equivalent to traditional desktop programs in their performance, capabilities and display options. In this paper the previously described technology is use to design and implement a specialized RIA for the visualization of modern supply chain processes.