Case study – Central Order Generation System.

We would discuss a scenario where a pallet manufacturing company would rent its pallet to different businesses and would eventually bill the businesses depending on the number of pallets they are holding on to.

For ease of use let us use names for companies:-
Pallet Manufacturing Company – CompPallet
Soft Drink Manufacturer – CompSoftDrink
Retail Store – CompRetail

We would discuss two other technologies used here which would be RFID and SSL.

CompPallet produces pallet and labels them with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags for easier and smoother tracking. CompSoftDrink is a user of pallets and CompRetail as well uses pallets for various purposes.

Because CompPallet is renting pallets to both the companies and both the companies are also involved in a business between them as CompSoftDrink is supplying soft drinks to CompRetail for selling in the market, they all need to keep track of how many pallets they are holding on to at a particular time so that they can account for them properly, secondly CompPallet also needs to know which company is holding on to how many number of pallets so that it can bill them properly.

To get this working in coordination and without any hassle there has to be system which could keep a track of everything and can provide strategic reports to all the 3 companies involved.
The central order generation system provides a solution; it generates orders with Order Header and sends it across to the 2 companies, these companies fill these orders with details from their WMS (Warehouse Management Systems), details here would be the Pallet Ids which they are holding on to and which can scanned using RFID scanner as they were labeled at the time of the manufacturing and send the order back to the central system.

Central system provides a web based portal where the clients can login and see strategic reports. These reports tell the exact location of the pallets and help all the businesses involved in monitoring their supply chain.

Next post would be about how we can use BizTalk Server in creating and maintaining this central order generation system.