Interoperability and Supply Chain Management

International audienceThis chapter shows how interoperability contributes to fulfilling the needs for transactional and/or informational collaboration in modern supply chains. Supply chain management implies transversal interoperability across several interdependent entities on the legal, institutional and strategic planes, without these entities establishing any subordination relationship. The chapter identifies the various types of interoperability that exist between the decision centers involved in a collaborative process, and more specifically in a logistic process. The various types of supply chain interoperability have been defined. The chapter discusses the application vectors of these types of interoperability: information systems. Classically, there is two types of architecture to support supply chain logistic interoperability: the first one is a “point-to-point” linking enabling the “hard” linkage of the various information systems involved in supply chain management processes. The second type of architecture emerged over the past few years with architectures called service oriented architectures (SOA)