Patent ID: 7529695

Claim:
A supply chain management system for clients where the clients include a plurality of buyers and a plurality of suppliers, where said buyers place orders with a plurality of suppliers for the processing of an input to an output, wherein said input is one or more lots, through a plurality of supplier stages, said clients each using fragmented different local information particular to each of said clients, the improvement characterized by, network communication means for interconnecting said clients for maintaining said local information current in said supply chain management system, a database store for storing master information in one or more tables having said master information correlated to said local information, global processing means for processing supply chain management information for all of said clients including, input mapping means for mapping said local information for each of said clients as mapped data to provide master information for storage in said database store, said mapping means using base lot indicators, one for each of said one or more lots, in common for all of said stages, logic means for executing supply chain management functions for tracking said lots through said supplier stages using said base lot indicators, said logic means including means for creating a set of purchase orders to a group of said suppliers for processing the same lot through a supply chain where the creation of purchase orders for downstream suppliers is dynamically conditioned on the outputs of upstream suppliers, said logic means accessing the master information for executing supply chain management functions for tracking said lots through said supplier stages and providing management data for creation of ones of said set of purchase orders, output mapping means for mapping said management data into local data for said clients; wherein suppliers supply local supplier information to said system via data in electronic records and reports and wherein said correlation means includes data integrity means that operates to check for data consistency within records, data consistency within reports, data consistency across different reports from a particular supplier, data consistency among data from multiple suppliers and one or more buyers, data consistency among data from multiple suppliers.