Bachelor-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2004.

Supply chains in many industries are experiencing an ever-growing complexity. They involve many actors and, similar to intra-organizational processes, visibility is an important enabler for managing supply chains in an inter-organizational setting. It is the backbone of advanced sup-ply chain (event) management solutions, which serve to detect critical incidents in time and to determine alternative actions. Due to the numerous parties involved, distributed supply chains call for a modular system architecture that aims at re-using visibility data from standardized sources. Following the wide variety of supply chain configurations in many industries there are also many options to design such services. This paper sheds light on these aspects by conduct-ing a case study on EPCIS, a global service specification for capturing and sharing visibility data. Based on three implementations, it shows the main design options for a supply chain vis-ibility service, generic operator models as well as major potentials.:1. Introduction and motivation 2. Research questions and methodology 3. Literature analysis 4. EPCIS case study 4.1. Deutsche Post DHL 4.2. ThyssenKrupp 4.3. GS1 Germany 5. Discussion and findinds 5.1.Design options 5.2. Operator models 5.3. Potentials 6. Conclusions