Decisions on capacity are often treated separately from those of production and inventory. In most situations, capacity issues are longer-term, so capacity-related decisions are considered strategic and thus not part of supply planning. This research focuses on optimal supply planning with emphasis on variable capacity to meet uncertain demand. It also defines three levels of capacity change: operating hours, labor availability and production hardware availability. The work presented here deals with the fundamental decisions to determine capacity, production, and inventory to meet customer demand while optimizing revenue and costs over a planning horizon (typically the life of the product). With the Lagrangian technique for constrained optimization, it can be shown that the optimal supply capacity has upper and lower bounds. The optimal feedback policy prescribes increasing the supply capacity when at the beginning of the planning interval it is below the lower bound. Similarly, the supply capacity should be decreased to the upper bound when it is above the upper bound. This paper will present arguments for characterizing forecast evolution and information sharing in the supply chain to obtain a predictor-corrector approach to supply chain control. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

<p>Date June 12, 2008</p><p>Program IT Management</p><p>Authors Jessica Jarrell, 820506.</p><p>Västerås</p><p>Rais Iqbal, 791229.</p><p>Västerås</p><p>Supervisor Ole Liljefors</p><p>Title Business-to-Business IT Integration</p><p>Introduction</p><p>As business world has moved into digital era, new trends in business models have been emerged to do business. Digital infrastructure provided by internet enables enterprises to extend their boundaries for new customer and trading partners. Extending the enterprise without a solid IT infrastructure is incomplete, this is the reasons that enterprises are investing more and more in IT to build an IT integrated infrastructure where all its trading partners are linked together. On the other hand, technological world provides solutions and services to build IT integration for such extended enterprises. A wide variety of IT integration solutions and patterns available for enterprise to meet their integration goals, but this often brings unclear situation where companies have to think a lot before implementing IT integration patterns. A slight mistake in this scenario could shake the equilibrium between IT and business, to keep the equilibrium steady companies need to thoroughly examine their short-term and long-term goals and then different integration patterns can be employed to meet these goals.</p><p>Research Question</p><p>What approaches can be helpful for companies to accomplish successful business-to-business IT integration pattern for their short-term and long-term goals?</p><p>Purpose</p><p>The purpose of this thesis is to describe the concept of extended enterprises and, identify and describe the existing B2B IT integration approaches employed by extended enterprises.</p><p>Method</p><p>The research is of qualitative type and secondary data is used to conduct this research. Books and research papers has been used to construct theoretical framework. Electronic databases available at library of Mälardalen University such as Google scholar, Emerald and interlibrary network of Sweden (Libris) are used to search for secondary data.</p><p>Analysis Findings from the detailed literature study are analyzed to answer the research question. Integration patterns are analyzed described by the different authors of integrations patterns in three different ways. Firstly, integration patterns were analyzed in term of their advantages and disadvantages with technology and business, secondly, maturity of these integration patterns are analyzed and finally these integration patterns are analyzed for company’s short-term and long-term goals.</p><p>Conclusion Business process oriented and method-oriented approaches are good for long-term goals due to handling of business process management in both approaches and reusability aspects of method oriented approach. For short-term goals portal-oriented approach dominating in the integration community, application interface oriented approach is also good to meet the short-term goals. However, combinations of different approaches are found feasible.</p>

Date June 12, 2008 Program IT Management Authors Jessica Jarrell, 820506. Västerås Rais Iqbal, 791229. Västerås Supervisor Ole Liljefors Title Business-to-Business IT Integration Introduction As business world has moved into digital era, new trends in business models have been emerged to do business. Digital infrastructure provided by internet enables enterprises to extend their boundaries for new customer and trading partners. Extending the enterprise without a solid IT infrastructure is incomplete, this is the reasons that enterprises are investing more and more in IT to build an IT integrated infrastructure where all its trading partners are linked together. On the other hand, technological world provides solutions and services to build IT integration for such extended enterprises. A wide variety of IT integration solutions and patterns available for enterprise to meet their integration goals, but this often brings unclear situation where companies have to think a lot before implementing IT integration patterns. A slight mistake in this scenario could shake the equilibrium between IT and business, to keep the equilibrium steady companies need to thoroughly examine their short-term and long-term goals and then different integration patterns can be employed to meet these goals. Research Question What approaches can be helpful for companies to accomplish successful business-to-business IT integration pattern for their short-term and long-term goals? Purpose The purpose of this thesis is to describe the concept of extended enterprises and, identify and describe the existing B2B IT integration approaches employed by extended enterprises. Method The research is of qualitative type and secondary data is used to conduct this research. Books and research papers has been used to construct theoretical framework. Electronic databases available at library of Mälardalen University such as Google scholar, Emerald and interlibrary network of Sweden (Libris) are used to search for secondary data. Analysis Findings from the detailed literature study are analyzed to answer the research question. Integration patterns are analyzed described by the different authors of integrations patterns in three different ways. Firstly, integration patterns were analyzed in term of their advantages and disadvantages with technology and business, secondly, maturity of these integration patterns are analyzed and finally these integration patterns are analyzed for company’s short-term and long-term goals. Conclusion Business process oriented and method-oriented approaches are good for long-term goals due to handling of business process management in both approaches and reusability aspects of method oriented approach. For short-term goals portal-oriented approach dominating in the integration community, application interface oriented approach is also good to meet the short-term goals. However, combinations of different approaches are found feasible.

People around the world who are working in companies and organisations need to collaborate, and in their collaboration use information managed by different information systems. The requirements of information systems to be interoperable are therefore apparant. While the technical problems, of communicating or sharing information between different information systems, have become less difficult to solve, the attention has turned to other aspects of interoperability. Such aspects concern the bussiness processes, the knowledge, the syntax and the semantics that involves the information managed by information systems. Enterprise modelling is widely used to achieve integration solutions within enterprises and is a research area both for the integration wihin an enterprise (company or organisation) and the integration between several different enterprises. Enterprise modelling takes into account several of the aspects, mentioned as important for interoperability, in the models that are created. This thesis describes a research which has resulted in the connector view concept. The main contribution with this framework comprises a model structure and an approach, for performing the modelling of the collaboration between several partners in an extended enterprise. The purpose of the enterprise models thus created, by using the connector view concept, is to find solutions to interoperability problems, that exist in the collaboration between several enterprises.