System for enhancing supply chain agility through exception handling

With the emergence of a new business era characterized by continuous and unpredictable changes and tough global competition, an agile supply chain has been recognized as a competitive strategy for companies to survive and prosper. Co-OPERATE, an on-going IST project, is aimed at developing concepts and tools for coordination of production planning and control activities in the complex and distributed supply network, and is targeted in the automotive supply and the semiconductor industries. Since the work reported here is based on the project, a framework for manufacturing coordination in the distributed supply network is proposed for the project. As an important part of the project, exception handling is further described. First, through boundary investigation, the scope of this business solution is clarified. Second, a methodology is developed to help understand the mechanism behind the exception handling process. Third, guiding design principles are described to direct the detailed business process design. Finally, rush-order handling is chosen as part of the concept prototype for implementation and evaluation. Extensive feedback from industrial business partners has been collected and taken into account for further implementation.