Intelligent Agents in Supply Chain Management as an Early Warning Mechanism

E-Business technology has broadly been used in supply chain management to improve the relationships between business to business and between business to customers. It can be thought of as a tool with electronic information-integrated capability to reduce the time and cost of data processing, analysis and communication. The agent technology has recently been broadly used to assist business activities. An agent is an autonomous and computational entity. Agents can also work together (called multiple agents) to collect related knowledge and achieve a common goal. In this paper we propose a framework of an e-SCM multiple-agent system for early warning of possibly lost customers. Setting up an early-warning mechanism for business is very important to supply chain management. If a business can not provide suitable products or services for customers, customers could be lost without any announcement mechanism. It integrates data mining and intelligent agents together to automatically understand customers´ behaviors and impressions, and then finds possibly lost customers based on the information. The proposed approach has also been implemented in a company to show its effects.