Agility is important, and SOA is all about agility, but agility is really IT’s concern and not the central focus of business executives, nor is dealing with change the key objective of BPM.

BPM’s top-down model-initiated approach can actually accelerate the SOA rollout by fostering business-IT alignment with concrete performance metrics, and encouraging an iterative approach to the production implementation.

Of respondents to a Booz Alien Hamilton SCM survey, 45 percent reported that their solution failed to meet expectations (InformationWeek, 2003).

A Forrester Research survey found that more than half of the companies interviewed had SCM systems that failed to meet their expectations (Mazur, 2003)

A chain typically implies linear, sequential relationships from one link to the next. There are two problems with this term. First, not all goods flow sequentially. Some supply chains involve concurrent material flow. For example, Dell's monitors ship concurrently with its computers. second, the information flow, which is often what is managed for competitive advantage in a supply chain, does not always flow sequentially. In fact, information that is shared with many nodes at once can result in faster, more accurate, and nimble supply chains.

Last month we talked about how service-oriented architecture (SOA) is making BPMS technology more agile by eliminating the custom code once needed to integrate the various systems involved in a business process.

the separation of business process management as an independent function, allowing processes to be designed independently of any single application and leveraged as shared business logic.

the concept of orchestration is rooted in the fundamental shift of application design towards the delivery of software as a service, evolving from the maturation of both J2EE and Web services.

The process-driven and service-oriented architecture presented by the combination of SOA and BPM provides an ideal environment for building adaptable, model-driven composite applications or "composite apps" from existing IT assets and infrastructure.

Discover how business process management (BPM) fits into the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) life cycle. This series, using architectural scenarios, explains how BPM, when combined with SOA, provides greater flexibility for your business processes and IT infrastructure.

Web 2.0 and SOA really are largely (but not 100%) the same concepts that merely lay on different — if fairly different — parts of the software continuum

SOA is the dominant design paradigm in business software today

The core principle of SOA is the decomposition of software into sets of services which can be used and composed into new applications that have a very high level of integration and reuse.

QoS covers a whole range of techniques that match the needs of service requestors with those of the service provider's based on the network resources available. By QoS, we refer to non-functional properties of Web services such as performance, reliability, availability, and security.

separate QoS language for Web services

The following steps should be performed during binding establishment using a QoS-enabled Web services platform: The service requestor requests the establishment of the binding by specifying the reference to a Web service interface. This request also contains the required QoS. The QoS broker searches for the service providers in the UDDI. The QoS broker performs QoS negotiation as described below. The Web service QoS broker compares the offered QoS with the required QoS and uses its internal information to determine an agreed QoS. This process is called QoS negotiation. If the QoS negotiation has been successful, the service requestor and service provider are informed that a negotiation has been successful and a binding has been built. From this moment on these objects can interact through the binding.

Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) exposes Amazon's product data and e-commerce functionality. This allows developers, web site owners and merchants to leverage the data and functionality that Amazon uses to power its own e-commerce business.

BPM’s conceptual top down approach facilitates business process modeling and process optimization while SOA’s bottom up approach helps in process execution and monitoring.

Advantages of an SOA strategy:

1. Better alignment with the business

Enterprise architecture

improving the way your company finds the raw components it needs to make a product or service and deliver it to customers

A big piece of planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that it is efficient, costs less and delivers high quality and value to customers

1. Plan

What are some emerging technologies that will affect the Supply Chain? The most notable is Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID

Right now the two biggest hurdles to widespread RFID adoption are the cost of building the infrastructure and the lack of agreed-upon industry standards.

Web services are a linking and communications methodology. SOA is an overall IT strategy.

it is an architectural strategy, SOA involves much more than merely building software.

Governance is critical

ERP is the battering ram that integrates all that information together in a single application, and SCM applications benefit from having a single major source to go to for up-to-date information

Most CIOs who have tried to install SCM applications say they are glad they did ERP first.

Now, you can connect your supply chain with the supply chains of your suppliers and customers together in a single vast network