Development of collaborative order processing and inventory tracking software

Order processing and inventory tracking are key operational business processes. Enterprise Resource Planning systems organize these cross-functional processes within a company and eliminate interfaces between functional areas such as materials management and finance. However, they are not designed to manage processes across different departments of an organization and interfaces with external partners. There is still significant inefficiency in collaborative order processing and inventory tracking with customers, suppliers and service providers. Examples include repeated manual entries of order processing or status information. Although solutions for collaborative order processing and inventory tracking exist, these are proprietary and costly in nature. Software vendors such as SAP, i2, Yantra or Optum are developing standard solutions with features such as seamless order routing between business partners and the availability of real-time information on multi-site inventory, transport capacities or delivery status, still these will be costly and complicated solutions, which a midsize organization may not be able to implement.; The objective of this research is to develop a comprehensive tool that can be used collaboratively by the various departments of an organization for order processing and inventory tracking. The software tool will be implemented in Visual Basic for the Windows operating system.