Reduce Shipping Delays and Costs in Long-distance Supply Chains

The Automotive Industry Action Group's (AIAG) Material Off-Shore Sourcing (MOSS) project is an initiative designed to improve the business processes and information exchanges that drive the intercontinental shipment of goods.  AIAG has concluded that standards for the electronic exchange of information will result in direct economic benefit will be reductions in buffer-stock inventory and premium transportation costs. This project has four major objectives: define necessary information objects, propose standards for those objects, select associated EDI (electronic data interchange) messages, develop an integration infrastructure to exchange those messages, and conduct implementation demonstrations using selected business process scenarios.

Information deficiencies are a common source of delays in the supply chain. Many individual OEM’s and Tier 1 suppliers have voiced  frustration about the lack of visibility into delays at ports, with carriers,  customs, and other government agencies.  These deficiencies in the information lead to the maintenance of increased buffer-stock inventory, the use of premium transportation and expediting, and the obscured but very significant cost of human interventions in a process that would, with better information, be fully automated.  They also lead to delays in 15 % of all ocean shipments, resulting in millions of dollars of added costs each year.

AIAG’s MOSS team believes that the time is right to migrate to a paperless environment and produce paper documents only on an as-needed basis.  AIAG approached NIST to help with this migration.   To date, the NIST project team has completed five major activities.

• Developed a MOSS conceptual model of the objects and relationships in ocean-freight transport and messaging supporting the management of ocean-freight manufacturing supply chains.
• Defined the MOSS message type structures, which include the ~100 key properties for the management of ocean-freight manufacturing supply chains, and mappings of this information into EDIFACT  messages.
• Developed tools to assess the conformance of MOSS participants’ messages to the MOSS recommendation. The current tools check for correct syntax formation and the presence of required information elements.
• Designed a message metamodel for representing the structure of an EDI- or XML-based message type. Its use in MOSS may demonstrate a strategy for decoupling concerns of message syntax from the task of message processing.
• Built a Queries/Views/Transformations (QVT) mapping engine, which is the major component of the conformance validation tooling.  It will be used to map information from EDI messages to a form consistent with the MOSS conceptual model.

The results of these activities were used in a demonstration that showed conformance of a few vendor products to the proposed standards.  The second demonstration focuses on interoperability. It will show that vendors can successfully exchange messages among themselves according to the business process.

The NIST team has begun work on a new interoperability demonstration to show that vendors can exchange messages successfully among themselves according to the business process. This interoperability demonstration will use a simulation of the business process and logistics plan as a basis for determine which exchange messages will be sent and the ender/receiver of those messages.  The underlying activities associated with this demonstration include

• Developing a business process scenario for interoperability demonstration      
  
• Defining the relevant information objects and EDI messages        
• Developing a simulation of business process/logistics plans        
• Developing new business process models and integration tools