Supply Chain

Defining Supply Chain

A supply chain is the network of organizations, people, activities, information, and resources involved in producing and delivering a product or service from the supplier to the customer. It includes everything from sourcing raw materials to manufacturing, distribution, and final delivery.

Business, Supply Chains and Risk Mitigation

Survival depends on supply chains. To raise livestock to provide food, a producer needs feed. The questions is what, how, where and when is a product acquired?

Small supply chains are simple, but life depends on a supply of food for animals and people. Complex societies or countries have similar struggles for survival. It is all about empowering people and business success. Businesses and people need infrastructure to sustain the needs of a country. 

Economic, Social, Political and Regional Complexities

Successful  supply chains must be organized around economic systems, global engagement, and adaptability. 

Trust and Reliability

Empowering the Supply Chains means "making it easy" to find and acquire a product from trusted and reliable partners.

Trust is established through repeated experience. Businesses are reliable when they deliver quality product in timely and reliable manner. 

Communication, sharing information (good or bad) in a timely and effective manner is key to development and maintenance of a successful supply chain partnership.

Secure Information Creation and Sharing 

Technologists have failed to deliver an easy to use secure data sharing solution because the solution must be a community based initiative.

SPDX is a open source data sharing format. The integration of the AM supply chain (open sources) creates a new dynamic data creation and sharing method. Security is added into SPDX using data centric ERMA (open standard) security extensions. Distribution is delivered through the open source Information Exchange Framework (IEF-RA).

Follows the Money - Traceability

The process is simple, have those who produce a product create the information and attach it to the product to create a comprehensive history for buyer and sellers through the chain.

(This example below is not a comprehensive list of actions. )

Parallel or Multi Target Sharing - The real challenge!

Securely sharing point to point of buyer to seller is easy. 

Securely sharing point to multi point is harder.  

Supply chains are multi point to multi point which is very difficult. 

Consider traceability that requires securing and accessing multiple documents throughout a supply chain. Validation and verification are important parts for trust within the document sharing process. 

Graphene Production is part of an important supply chain related to computer chip manufacturing. The above illustration illustrates the need for multiple companies share document with multiple agents within the supply chain. 

Each company (1...4) has different roles related to graphene production.  Each company creates and shares information with companies up and/or down the process chain, such as with transport companies, other suppliers, regulators, industry and customers. This a a complex web of interactions based of different information needs and processes.

Different Templates, Different Needs, Different Destinations, Same Data

The following illustrations how different templates (1, 2, 3) have different requirements. The different requirements (data records) are pulled from data sources within the organization to generate electronic documents. Each document is provided automatically to the target regulator based on need.