In today's highly competitive business environment, most companies try to manage their logistics function strategically to satisfy their orders as cost-effectively as possible and maximize their present and future profits. In this environment, logistics process visibility is essential to companies wishing to competently track components, parts, or products in transit from the original suppliers to the final destinations. Thus, it is important to provide instantly and easily recognizable information about such visibility to all stakeholders, especially customers. To ensure a high-level geographical visibility of the logistics processes, in this paper, we propose a way of implementing a GIS-based logistics process monitoring environment and of integrating a performer's work processing environment on the monitoring system. Additionally, to provide more abundant monitoring information, we describe a procedure for creating and processing various monitoring information, which are represented as ECA rules in this work processing environment. Therefore, it is possible to provide intuitive and visible monitoring information regarding the logistics process and resource elements. Keywords: GIS-based BPM, logistics process, process monitoring, process visibility, smart logistics. Manuscript received Aug. 5, 2014; revised Jan. 27, 2015; accepted Feb. 3, 2015. This work was supported by the Postal Technology R&D program of MSIP, Rep. of Korea (10039146, Development of Implementation Technology for SMART Post).Yeong-Woong Yu (corresponding author, hero@etri.re.kr) and Hoon Jung (hoonjung@ etri.re.kr) are with the IT Convergence Technology Research Laboratory, ETRI, Daejeon, Rep. of Korea.Hyerim Bae (hrbae@pusan.ac.kr) is with the Department of Industrial Engineering, Pusan National University, Busan, Rep. of Korea.
I. IntroductionIn today's highly competitive environment, many companies are aiming to gain a share of the global market and take advantage of higher production and sourcing efficiencies. A key determinant of business performance nowadays is the role of the "logistics function" in ensuring a smooth flow of the materials, products, and information throughout a company's supply chains [1]. Most businesses aim to provide their customers with products or services in an effective and timely manner. Therefore, logistics is very important to business. In logistics systems, items are produced at one or more factories, shipped to warehouses for intermediate storage, and then shipped to retailers or customers [2].According to IBM Center, in today's world, by improving the visibility of inventories, asset management, and information, logistics has emerged as a key cost control area in many organizations' supply chain operations. One of the primary purposes to ensure such visibility is to improve the internal decision-making ability and operational performance. Through ensuring the visibility from the supplier to the end user, greater visibility can also provide a clearer view of their entire supply chain [3]. More recently, ...