THE ROLE OF INTELLIGENT INFORMATION SYSTEM IN E-SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT PERFORMANCE

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shifted supply chain into intelligent supply chains. AI techniques nowadays appears to support supply chain processes, and have showed increased use of commercial AI applications for supply chain representation in many forms. The underlying assumption of this article is that companies along with suppliers and clients are willing to reduce the risk of uncertainty and reduce demand fluctuation which affect the lead time that impact the supply chain performance. Intelligent information system would be used to conduct part of supply chain transactions in the real time, which would reduce the lead time and reduce the uncertainty of demand fluctuation along supply chain parties, reducing the lead time and bullwhip effect would increase the supply chain management efficiency and enhance its performance. In particular, this article assumes that an agent-based intelligent information system is capable of managing its own activities (e.g., the general reasoning capabilities of AI planning) and its uncertainty in other agents’ behaviors that affect its reasoning capabilities. Thus, it may be advantageous for the involving agents to coordinate on the estimates of their task executions so that they could reduce the uncertainties by employing other agents’ estimates. Moreover, this article focuses on the way in which an intelligent agent-based system communicates along supply chain parties in SME FMCG retail and distribution industry, and introduce an intelligent information system for supply chain management which suppose an enhancement on supply chain performance in e-supply chain platform.