The Supply Chain Network in a Component Environment Gek Woo Tan Michael J. Shaw Department of Business Administration University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1. Introduction A supply chain is a network of business units and facilities that procure raw materials, transform them into intermediate goods and then final products, and deliver the products to customers through a distribution system. The focus of SCM has shifted from engineering efficient manufacturing processes to the coordination of activities in the supply chain through knowledge management.
Information is a key ingredient in coordination.
In CRP, for instance, the retailer's warehouse inventory movement is the key information that the manufacturer requires in order to determine the product replenishment quantity and frequency. A major barrier towards information sharing is the incompatibility of different computer systems. Frequently, each company develops its own proprietary systems, hence channel partners have to make a further investment in developing compatible computer systems in order to share information. In the component environment, software application programs, system management facilities and other services are treated as component objects. The ORB locates the object to implement the request, passes it the parameters, invokes its method and returns the results to the client stub.