Efficient planning, forecasting and replenishment is critical for survival of businesses. In the past, this has been restricted to the four walls of the enterprise. As competition intensifies, industries are aligning their supply chains that are competing with one another. This has forced planning, forecasting and replenishment to be collaborative in order to increase the visibility of inventory levels, manufacturing load schedules and distribution load schedules across the entire supply chain. Anand Das will discuss how J2EE supports distributed data flows and distributed data repositories that provide tight synchronization for all enterprise business processes including scheduling, purchasing, storage, logistics, capacity, marketing and cash-flow planning.   

Das will first examine the component framework offered by Enterprise Java Beans that enable rapid development and assembly of modular browser based applications. Secondly, the role of Java Messaging Specification (JMS) allowing loosely coupled systems within the enterprise and outside. Third, he will discuss the centrality of the J2EE Connector Framework for the seamless integration and unified view of security, transactions and protocols over multiple disparate applications. Finally, Das will focus on dynamic business process management as a key enabler for nimble supply chains. Together, J2EE technology and business process management provide an open framework that empowers companies to easily manage, expand and change their eBusiness strategies in real time.

The demonstration from Commerce Events will describe how the use of RFID technology, coupled with a robust real-time, distributed, event-driven infrastructure can dramatically improve operational efficiencies in logistics and warehousing. Some of the key operational barriers that are known to plague a typical warehousing facility are:

• Mis-stocking
• Mis-picking
• Mis-shipping
• Overages and underages from the supplier
• Theft, etc.

The result is lossage and missed, late or partial fulfillments. This also leads to discrepancies between the physical and the virtual inventory worlds, that live in the warehouse systems for months to come until reconciliation at the next cycle-count which in itself is a hugely disruptive and expensive process. Also these discrepancies ripple through the entire enterprise, leading to inaccurate reports, wrong forecasts, over-stocking, over-supplying, missed sales, etc. The demonstration from CME will describe how RFID technology can be effectively deployed to remove these barriers to operational excellence and fully automate some of the key processes in a warehouse such as Receive and Stocking, while at the same time allowing human beings to get involved at any step as needed. It will also show that using a distributed real-time framework that combines domain-expertise with a process tool, how effective and easy it is to associate business semantics with RFID events that can be conveniently and dynamically tailored to suit the needs of business.