SCOR+
Ontology-Based Supply Chain Process Mapping
The supply chain community is using the Supply Chain Operations Reference model (SCOR model) to define their supply chains, measure its performance, and benchmark it against industry standards. However, the SCOR model methodology is limited in defining the supply chain. The SCOR model defines the supply chain in terms of processes, performance metrics, and best practices. In fact, the supply chain community exerts massive effort to render an adequate supply chain definition that includes the other elements besides the elements covered in the SCOR model. Also, the SCOR model is delivered to the user in a document, which puts a tremendous burden on the user to use the model and makes it difficult to share the definition within the enterprise or across the supply chain.
SCOR+ is directed towards overcoming the limitations of the basic SCOR model through an easy to use ontology based tool that will enable an automated and comprehensive definition of the Supply Chain at any level of details. SCOR+ captures all the constituent parts of the Supply Chain at four different levels which are, the supply chain level, the enterprise level, the elements level, and the interaction level.
SCOR+ utilizes several modeling techniques to generate generic explicit views and models that represents the four levels. The developed views and models were transformed to a series of questions and answers, where the questions correspond to what a view provides and the answers are the knowledge captured and generated from the view. The questions and answers were integrated to render a generic multi-view of the supply chain. The methodology and the multi-view were implemented in the ontology-based tool SCOR+. The ontology includes sets of generic supply chain ontological components that represent the supply chain elements and a set of automated procedures that can be utilized to define a specific supply chain. A specific supply chain can be defined by re-using the generic components and customizing them to the supply chain specifics. The ontology-based tool was developed to function in the supply chain dynamic, information intensive, geographically dispersed, and heterogeneous environment. To that end, SCOR+ was developed to be generic, sharable, automated, customizable, extensible, and scalable.