Consumer goods and services, from an electronic systems standpoint, are represented by objects driving the design of Web-based applications, e-Business and e-Government. Goods and services plus distribution define commerce, which consists of filling and creating customer needs through a comprehensive supply chain. Goods, services and the related supply chain are interrelated through a series of complex links, which due to their sometimes fragile nature; we call “threads.” We chose this term to reflect this potentially fragile interrelationship between elements of the economy.

As we have seen with the recent collapse of the housing market, a breakdown in any of these threads can have far reaching impact on the economy, especially when represented by derivatives (paper representations of tangible assets). Within this economic environment, Avum is exploring the possibilities of an e-Commerce solution to monitor goods and services supply chain intersections for anomalies that could cause a disruption to the commerce threads which provide the connectivity supporting a multi-layered economy.

Avum’s Role

In conjunction with Avum e-Business and e-Government applications, we provide a Web-based architecture that can be expanded to provide distributed access to data repositories representing a goods and services supply chain from concept and manufacturing/processing through marketing and distribution to point of sale. This is done for both government and commercial interests.

Our objective is to provide near real-time availability of information that can be used to identify overage or shortage situations at critical access points (thread intersections) and react in time to cut or increase production as necessary to optimize the flow of goods and services. On a national or global scale such notification can be used to control inventories and distribution to ensure availability of products and services where and when needed. The more efficient the end-to-end process can be made, the less it will cost in terms of storage, transportation, labor and spoilage.

This system will “learn” from experience and update the Web-logic accordingly. The longer the system actively monitors and provides control information to users, the more applications will be found, perhaps even including predictions used in planning that can be applied to averting certain economic crises.