Intelligent networked devices for enabling proactive collaboration with customers

A proactive collaboration with customers facilitates serving of their explicit as well as implicit requirements. However, current supply chain organisation and installed information systems have often problems with dynamic interfacing of supply chain actors and with supporting real life interaction principles. Therefore, specifically interaction between supplier's suppliers with customer's customer is hardly to achieve, notably if distributed and asynchronous interaction takes place in between those peers. Therefore, the paper presents a research approach, which tackles this problem scenario by aiming at an intelligent usage of networked devices like e.g. PDAs and mobile phones, combined with the enabling technologies "Radio Frequency Identification" and "Global Navigation Satellite Systems". Furthermore, the key technical characteristics of a potential solution environment are presented, outlining the major components with respect to an architectural and security infrastructure as well as software agents and services for supporting decentralised coordination of tasks in supply chains.