The past, present, and future of supply-chain automation

Abstract

The trend nowadays is to automate intercompany and company-to-customer relationships, also called collaboration, using the Internet. Through this, it is possible to receive orders from a global customer and fulfill them automatically with minimal human intervention. The limiting factors, however, are the country infrastructure and the lack of trust between humans. This paper discusses the history of automation from the viewpoints of material-flow, information-flow, supervision and control, and relationship automation and identify future directions.