The MIDAS system that we have developed is an automated supply chain management system based on the Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services. MIDAS provides a loosely-coupled distributed environment that allows customers, manufacturers, and suppliers to cooperate over the Internet and World Wide Web. It aims to reduce inventory carrying costs and logistics administration costs, yielding a more efficient supply chain, by supporting just-in-time manufacturing. It eliminates, or substantially reduces, human intervention on both the customer/manufacturer side and the manufacturer/supplier side. It allows a manufacturer to select, dynamically from the MIDAS Registry, suppliers of components, based on the price, availability, and delivery time of those components. A manufacturer can use one of several strategies to aggregate customers’ orders before it processes them and to accumulate suppliers’ quotes before it decides on a particular supplier. The use of a Service Oriented Arch...