Vigilance Inc. last week made available software that provides supply chain event management capabilities presented as Web services.
Version 3.0 of the Vigilance SCEM suite offers real-time event management via Universal Description, Discovery and Integration-registered Web services; XML-based collaborative forms; and Closed Loop Control to the enterprise.
As such, Version 3.0 is compliant with major Web services standards, including Web Services Description Language, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), XML and Microsoft Corp.s .Net Framework. This compliance allows Vigilances core event management functionality to be easily extended to e-business portals and to the management of complex, cross-enterprise supply chain processes. It also lets other systems access key Vigilance components via its Web services API, said officials, in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Those components include exception services, which allow users to render all key events in a portal, as well as the Vigilance event engine, which lets users subscribe to key events that are published to the network.
Version 3.0s Closed Loop Control allows users to create transactions from within Vigilance to another source system, resulting in real-time process management for communities without direct access to source systems, according to Subhash Tantry, co-founder and chief technology officer at Vigilance. The Closed Loop system can also be customized to automatically resolve events that meet predefined criteria.
Configurable, XML-based forms, called Vigilance Collaborative Forms, allow the codification of business rules to enable collaboration with business partners.
“The Collaborative Form will allow me to drive, or funnel, the collaborative responses from customers to a preset format, which makes it much easier to act on those responses,” said Michael Tucker, director of laboratory services at Keyspan Corp. The Brooklyn, N.Y., company is beta testing Vigilance SCEM 3.0. “The second blue-sky opportunity is in collaboration with some of our outside testing laboratories,” Tucker said.
Because Web services security is still relatively immature, Vigilance has partnered with Actional Corp., which provides a SOAP switch that resides at the supplier site. The switch exposes Web services that have been authorized by the supplier and allows encryption and decryption of information.
Additional features of Vigilance SCEM 3.0 include Vigilance Real-Time Data Manager, which normalizes data from multiple, disparate systems. Vigilance Enterprise Manager provides a unified console based on Microsofts Operation Manager.
Adapters for SAP AGs MySAP. com and R/3 enterprise resource planning software are available with Vigilance SCEM 3.0 for integration with SAP systems.