Supply chain protocoling

Faced with the challenges of current e-business powered competitive environments, enterprises now find that it is not adequate to manage their own businesses but also the supply chain. They must be involved in managing the network of the upstream that provides the input, as well as the network of the downstream responsible for the output to the customer. Managing the supply chain has become one of the important issues in today's e-business as the participants span across the network among which the processes and services are independently designed and configured. It is required that a rich variety of interactions must be made available to enable and support the information flows. While several network protocols are currently operating, however, a supply chain protocol owns its specific properties to the business operation that is not supported by the current network protocols. In this paper, we investigate the needs of the supply chain protocol, and propose a novel approach for designing the protocol that brings the business processes and services together to support the supply chain management.