Supply Chain

Automation
Final Year Project

Why Software Project?

Huge opportunity to work with Atos
Origin India (regarded as one of the
leading brands in IT industry
worldwide)
Curiosity regarding how the IT industry
works, as majority of the jobs are IT
oriented
Willingness to learn new technologies
and accept new challenges
Software Applications are an integral
part of our lives

What is this project about?

Scenario : Retailer offering TV sets to Consumers
(TV delivery being the supply chain module)
The application should generate tasks for various
departments automatically (Automation)
To fulfill orders the Retailer has to manage stock
levels in warehouses ( 3 Warehouses considered )
When an item in stock falls below a certain
threshold, the Retailer must restock the item from
the relevant Manufacturers inventory ( One
Manufacturer, Sony )
In a simple way, our web-application handles the
part after an order bill is generated by websites
like eBay, Amazon, etc.

I have only 3!
Warehouse
A

Please Refill TVs in all my warehouses

Send 4 Tvs

Send 4 Tvs
Warehouse
B

Warehouse
C

4 Sony TVs
Retailer

Send 4 Tvs I have only 2!

I have only 2!

Customer

Is it really needed?

A recent study found that supply-chain

problems cost companies between 9 and
20 percent of their value over a six-month
period
Effective supply-chain software tools could
save companies billions of dollars
No open source application available for
Supply Chain Automation
Java based- hence can be accessed
anywhere
Reliable

How we built the project?

The business process was analyzed
and a flow diagram was designed on
paper
Lets have a look at the Flow Diagram

How we built the project?

(Cont.)
How to implement workflows? A very powerful
opensource tool,jBPM comes to the rescue
The flow diagram was then implemented
using the Graphical Process Designer for jBPM
configured in Eclipse IDE
jBPM needs Database,MySQL was configured
as the database for jBPM
jBoss AS was configured to run/host the jBPM
process
Dynamic Web Project was created for UI
pupose

Insight

Lets have a look

at the demo

Challenges

Which version of jBPM to be used?

jBPM 4 vs jBPM 3
jBPM4 tools are only half finished and quite
buggy
The original 'brain' of JBPM has left Redhat and
is now working on a competing open source
API under the name of 'Activiti
Apparently Redhat also already has JBPM5 in
development;JBPM4.x is given up for lost for
now and the focus for the tool development
will be on JBPM5
All is fine and well, but we all want is a working
JBPM API that DOES have functional tools. So
we stick with old JBPM 3.2.X, which has served
well

Challenges (Cont.)

Configuring jBPM 3.2.x with jBoss 5.0

Fixing jbpm-enterprise.jar
The main problem we needed to fix here is the
way that the JNDI lookups are done - it tries to
use the java:comp/env space, which is offlimits unfortunately
We needed to patch some source files to use
the real local JNDI names to get things working
Luckily we know these JNDI names; they are
defined in the jboss.xml descriptor file

Configuring jBoss Data Source file for

MySQL

Challenges (Cont.)

Which database to be used?

Although MySQL was directly suggested its
important to know why we need to use MySQL
when default configuration with HSQL is easier
than configuring another database with jBPM
HSQL vs MySQL
Hypersonic is a memory-residenttestdatabase. The
fact that all data is kept in memory accounts for the
speed difference.(HSQL is faster)
But would HSQL behave well in real situations?
(Doubt, implies Not reliable)
MySQL is a free 'real' database in the sense that it is
used in many production systems and is tested to be
reliable.

Into the future

We have released our project under
Eclipse public license (Open source
license) on Google Code
The project has got 31 download hits
already
Source code hosting with SVN

The project we developed serves on a

smaller scale and has a large scope of
development to serve the industry
Keeping this in mind we have hosted the
project on
http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/
supply-chain-automation/

Team
Sumeer Sinha (sumeersinha@gmail.com)
Mayank
Tiwari(tiwari.mayank89@gmail.com)
Shruti Patro
(shruti.patro@gmail.com)

Under the guidance of:

Prof. Clara Arackel (Dept. Of Electronics,RAIT)
Mr. Paritosh Wechalekar (Techinal Manager, Atos
Origin India)

Thank You