Developing efficient supply chain links using web services

The concept of Web services has attracted a lot of attention during the last few years. Web services allow a distributed system that is made up of many different computers to communicate over the familiar network, the Internet, to form one system. The communication standards and protocols used in Web services are universally accepted open standards. Web services are designed for machine-consumption that expose a Web-accessible program interface. This kind of service can be requested by any type of client application – Web-based, desktop or mobile. The authors of this paper provide an overview of Web services and discuss the potential of improving supply chain processes through the use of Web services.