Driss Hakimi, Benoit Montreuil, Olivier Labarthe

The concepts of supply chain, supply network and extended collaboration between partners are pushing more and more the limits of what should be considered when dealing with supply chain management. So, managers that were dealing with adjacent partners, needed to look at the entire supply chain, then to the entire supply network and then to the networks that are interacting with their supply network. However, when trying to deal with daily base supply chain management questions facing managers, the concepts of supply chain and supply network appears to be rapidly limited because of the complexity of physical, informational and financial flows and interactions between different actors of the supply context. In this article we introduce the concept of Supply Web which is defined as a network of interrelated supply networks, each embedding interlaced supply chains, involving multiple organizations with collaborative or competitive supply relationships.

The concept of supply web considers complex physical, informational and financial interorganisational flows between complex organisations embedding their own interlaced supply networks. This complex interactions result in huge quantities of data stored in multiple, large and distributed Information Systems. However, the available supply chain software solutions are mainly single company focused and internally oriented; making it very complicated for different managers and actors to get grasp of what is happening around them when interested to an extended view of their supply networks. Simple tasks such as visualising their supply networks and following various KPIs can take months before being achieved. We discuss the relevance of Supply Web concept to the Supply Chain Management field and we introduce a model suggesting a way of sharing information between partners and conceiving business intelligence tools to take in consideration the complexity involved with this concept. We introduce four tools: firstly, the Supply Web Mapper which is intended to help visualise, mine and assess statically the supply web and its performance. Secondly, the Supply Web Playback which helps visualise, mine and assess dynamically the supply web and its performance. Thirdly, a supply web real time monitoring application and finally a supply web simulator.