Development of Purchasing Information Process Agent System

It is not easy for business workers to find proper information for his job, because of the following problems:(1) information exist in various information system both internal and external with diverse formats(2) he cannot estimate relevance of all the information and (3) he cannot select proper information among large volume of information. The requirements for the systems are the following things:(1) search of relevant information from various internal and external information systems(2) proving an integrated view of information for workers, and (3) information processing and decision-making are seamlessly integrated fro business workers. We proposed an agent system to fulfill the requirements. We focus on the purchasing job, and developed a prototype system. PIPA(Purchasing Information Process Agent). The PIPA performs not only information processing jobs(information search gathering, display, business form -making)but also decision-making support job (evaluation of supplier candidates, and apply of sourcing policy) for sourcing manager. The framework of the PIPA can be appled to other information processing and desision-making jobs.