Resolving Supply Chain Standards Heterogeneity to Enhance Supply Chain Flexibility

Published

August 18, 2025

Author(s)

Elena Jelisic, Boonserm Kulvatunyou, Hakju Oh, Joshua Ki

Abstract

Flexibility is identified as a mandatory characteristic of today's supply chains. There are a few aspects of supply chain flexibility identified in the literature, and one of them is flexible supply chain integration. The standard for exchanging supply chain data plays a crucial role in that aspect. Today, software systems operate in different geopolitical, business process, and industry settings, and there is a great chance that they are using different Data Exchange Standards (DESes). Various approaches to deal with this heterogeneity exist; however, they can be exponentially time-consuming and expensive or may not meet desirable characteristics such as security constraints and scalability to changing use cases. In our recent paper, we proposed a novel approach based on the Core Component Specification (CCS) and its concept of the Business Context. Its central idea is the super data model that provides a semantic layer to link different DESes. Along with the super data model, the staging data model enables the import of any type of data structure definitions, and the library-specific data model enables aggregation and normalization of the imported content in the staging data model. Our research collaboration with industry partners found that the industry may need up to six use cases to manage supply chain standards heterogeneity, but commercial tools typically address only one of these use cases: data mapping. While the main contribution is the use case identification and decomposition, which will make the industry's needs more explicit, manageable, and automatable, the paper also outlines the user interfaces and backend needed to make the multi-standard management more productive.

Citation

ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

Flexible Supply Chain, Integration, Data Exchange Standardization

Citation

Jelisic, E. , Kulvatunyou, B. , Oh, H. and Ki, J. (2025), Resolving Supply Chain Standards Heterogeneity to Enhance Supply Chain Flexibility, ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=960630 (Accessed March 31, 2026)