Abstract
The business process of global third party logistics company is defined as a network of logistics activities which involves the products that are manufactured in the developing countries, such as Vietnam, China and so on, and delivered to North or South American countries via intermediate stopover sites. The third party logistics company usually uses proprietary logistics information system to support the related logistics activities. However, each consignor sometimes may require different business process based on the customer type or characteristics of their products. Therefore, the third party logistics company need to modify their business process to reflect customer's requirements, resulting in the modification of logistic information systems and additional costs. Therefore, a flexible mechanism is required to efficiently support the various types of requirements by the owners of the products. In this paper, first, we figured out various business rules related to third party global logistics activities. Second, we grouped the identified business rules into business processes, objects, relations, dependency, policy, representations, execution, and resources and further into precondition, postcondition, and invariant based on checking point in time. Furthermore, the categorized rules are classified into inter-activity and intra-activity rules based on the execution range. Third, we proposed a rule syntax to describe the defined rules into scripts which are understood by user and information system together. When each activity is executed, the rule manager checks whether there are rules related with the activity execution. Finally, we developed a prototype rule management system to show the feasibility of our proposed methodology and to validate it with an example.
