Enhancing Process Visibility of the Supply Chain ‘Data Pipeline’

Abstract

Although business process visibility is considered to be increasingly important for international trade, the visibility of existing supply chains is currently still ambiguous. Information deficiencies such as incorrectness or inconsistency of data are major determinants that decrease clarity. The Data Pipeline principle has been proposed to overcome the data quality shortcomings, enhance the visibility, and improve performance of the supply chain. In a first elaboration, the Data Pipeline model named the Distributed Trust Backbone (DTB) was designed and implemented in three different countries. In order to discover the effectiveness and feasibility of the model, the visualization of the Data Pipeline’s process flow is urgently required in terms of both real-time detection of system failures and process flow representations. However, there is no process visualization feature available for the Data Pipeline. This challenge is taken up in this paper. We propose a Data Pipeline monitoring system and describe the results of performed simulation tests based on a case study of the international trade lane between Southeast Asia and Europe.