Logistics

Increasing competition in product costs leads worldwide to the need of process improvement - especially in small and medium-sized enterprises. Projects of production and logistics, with the aim of optimising process organisation and manufacturing control are assumed to have the knowledge of decisive system parameters and adequate possibilities in interference. Against this background the efficient use of the resource information is very important in future. Precisely because the use of RFID in production control has even more rationalisation potentials, when the process monitoring of production process must be fast, safe and efficient real time close controlled.

The complexity of today’s products and the resulting complexity of business and manufacturing processes are already very high. Product complexity will increase because of the growing number of engine and car body variants. The possibilities to choose and to combine extra options will increase as well. In order to identify potentials for optimisation and to evaluate new concepts of cooperation and collaboration in multi-tier intra- and inter-company supply chains, these processes have to be modeled and described according to requirements of the automotive industry. The Supply Chain Operations Reference-Model (SCOR-Model) is an instrument to develop a simple and flexible methodology to model structures of supply chains and to scale realistic logistics processes.

A significant part of traffic in urban areas nowadays is transport traffic within the „last mile“, i.e. vehicles on delivery or pickup tours transporting goods from or to customers. This article describes new IT services, which on the one hand help optimizing this logistics traffic and on the other hand make the deliveries more customer-friendly.

After many years of development, positioning systems have reached a high level of accuracy and complexity. Many new applications and services are now possible. Location Based Services are one of the new buzzwords. But how can these new opportunities be used effectively? This article will show the basics of the localisation and system design. Finally, some examples point out the added value position information provides.

The article introduces the use of business rules technology for SCEM applications, outlining both the benefits and a possible architecture. Furthermore, a brief introduction to the business rules suite ILOG JRules and a description of its usage at the SCEM vendor Tilion Inc. is given.