A Federated PIM for Supply Chains
Bipin Chadha · 2003
A federation implies a loosely coupled system distributed across the internet or an intranet, where the participants can join in and leave the federation without breaking the federation. It also implies that the participants can function on their own when they are not a part of the federation. While our business units operate in this fashion for various programs such as Arsenal Ship, our computer based systems do not. We have developed a COTS based federated architecture to support multiple, geographically distributed organizations in a supply chain. This virtual supply chain can cut the cost and cycle time for programs. The key components of the architecture are (1) Federated Product Information Manager (PIM), and (2) Federated Production Planning and Scheduling. The paper discusses the work done to date with commercial tools towards realizing the federated PIM architecture.