Composite Web services for Implementing Vendor Managed Inventory

Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) is an efficient replenishment practice designed to enable the vendor to respond to demand without the distortive effect of purchasing decisions. Past implementations of VMI are based on EDIFACT inventory reports in a standard business system environment such as SAP R/3. Cost of such implementation is prohibitively high for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that typically exist in the lower end of the supply chain. Therefore, VMI concept has not been much used in this sector. Web services can be used as a cost effective alternative to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). In this paper we propose a composite Web Services based framework for VMI implementation that can be used by the SMEs along with an implementation scheme.