The inventive
system includes a method to let participants in a value chain of digital and physical goods to
package resources into sellable services and products, keep track of consumption of the resources and calculate charges to the end users and revenues to all participants. The participants to such supply chain include but not limited to resource suppliers, distributors, aggregators, resellers and service providers. The resources include but not limited to
digital goods such as computing capacity, storage, content,
software applications, data depository or special
data acquisition instruments and physical goods such as commodity and manufactured items. Through this invention, resource supplies and consumptions and thus charges and revenues can be tracked and accounted for simultaneously. Any participants to the supply chain can host such
system on behalf of itself and other participants. A participant can
package resources into sellable units, track the
resource supply by its suppliers and consumption by its customers, determine end users charges and revenues according to pricing structures and business rules including
end user charges, loyalties, commissions, reseller fees, and
roaming tariff, etc. When compared with the traditional methods, this invention tracks in real time all resource supplies and consumptions across the value chain simultaneously, in both actual resource unit and economic value. The invention can be realized in a combination of both hardware and
software.