Author:Inderpreet
Supply chain management (SCM) is now a main trait of today’s world. Increasingly managers, researchers, and educators recognize the importance of SCM as both a strategic and tactical weapon. SCM practices keep on changing with time. Earlier
it was just a way of monitoring the goods sold or purchased by the organization.
But as the time goes on, the SCM increases its roots to the entire supply chain. With the extension of SCM over different areas of business, the data generated and analyzed is massive. Therefore the challenge for SCM system revolves around data - managing, its access, distribution processing and storage.
Let’s take an example; Say an ABC company is the leading retail industry company, who spent a lot on his technology to handle its processes in the smooth manner.
The software that they use to play with such huge data, was complicated and needed to run thousands of what-if scenarios to determine end-of-day reports and to do forecasting for their business. Locked into large, multiprocessor Unix boxes, the detail report to generate the order placed in the day calculation, could take a
long time say nine hours. So they plan to upgrade their hardware, to further reduce the data processing time. But the analysis they done shows it would have cut the maximum time from nine hours to four and a half hours. Also they will have to burn lot of resources like power, space, air-conditioning etc to maintain those hardware units. Still after doing so much, the requirement to finish the report generation in an hour is not fulfilled. Thank God, an intelligent consultant Andrew, who usually visits their office, suggested them to go for Grid Computing. After hearing this term, most of the people have the question what Grid computing is and how it will be able to solve their problem.
According to IBM, Grid computing allows to unite pools of servers, storage systems, and networks into a single large system so as to deliver the power of multiple-systems resources to a single user point for a specific purpose. To a user, data file, or an application, the system appears to be a single enormous virtual computing system.
So Andrew has taken the charge, calls his team and they setup the grid by using the already-deployed desktop computers, taking advantage of every machine with available processing time. Then the dummy system to do the processing for Orders placed in a day is run on the setup Grid. The results were stunning. A job that used to take all day or overnight could now be completed in under an hour. And not only this, ABC saves his nearly 70% of cost and resources to use the new hardware. So this is the power of Grid.
The Grid offers a unique opportunity for SCM systems, by providing a reliable, scalable and robust infrastructure able to support efficient inventory management and fast order processing and scheduling. By the use of Grid Computing, we are utilizing the free resources to provide the higher computational and data power. Over the last decade, significant resources and research efforts have been devoted towards making this vision a reality and have lead to the development and deployment of a number of Grid infrastructures targeting a variety of applications where the large processing power is needed or where we have to deal with large data. Big software companies such as Oracle and SAP already either have products (Oracle 10g) or pilot programs (as SAP does) for grid-enabled applications in place. Grid Computing can provides the ability to process and fulfill orders faster; to analyze real-time business data to accelerate decision making; to maintain better synchronization between the demand and supply and much more.
So when are you going to invite grid to your SCM world!
it was just a way of monitoring the goods sold or purchased by the organization.
But as the time goes on, the SCM increases its roots to the entire supply chain. With the extension of SCM over different areas of business, the data generated and analyzed is massive. Therefore the challenge for SCM system revolves around data - managing, its access, distribution processing and storage.
Let’s take an example; Say an ABC company is the leading retail industry company, who spent a lot on his technology to handle its processes in the smooth manner.
The software that they use to play with such huge data, was complicated and needed to run thousands of what-if scenarios to determine end-of-day reports and to do forecasting for their business. Locked into large, multiprocessor Unix boxes, the detail report to generate the order placed in the day calculation, could take a
long time say nine hours. So they plan to upgrade their hardware, to further reduce the data processing time. But the analysis they done shows it would have cut the maximum time from nine hours to four and a half hours. Also they will have to burn lot of resources like power, space, air-conditioning etc to maintain those hardware units. Still after doing so much, the requirement to finish the report generation in an hour is not fulfilled. Thank God, an intelligent consultant Andrew, who usually visits their office, suggested them to go for Grid Computing. After hearing this term, most of the people have the question what Grid computing is and how it will be able to solve their problem.
According to IBM, Grid computing allows to unite pools of servers, storage systems, and networks into a single large system so as to deliver the power of multiple-systems resources to a single user point for a specific purpose. To a user, data file, or an application, the system appears to be a single enormous virtual computing system.
So Andrew has taken the charge, calls his team and they setup the grid by using the already-deployed desktop computers, taking advantage of every machine with available processing time. Then the dummy system to do the processing for Orders placed in a day is run on the setup Grid. The results were stunning. A job that used to take all day or overnight could now be completed in under an hour. And not only this, ABC saves his nearly 70% of cost and resources to use the new hardware. So this is the power of Grid.
The Grid offers a unique opportunity for SCM systems, by providing a reliable, scalable and robust infrastructure able to support efficient inventory management and fast order processing and scheduling. By the use of Grid Computing, we are utilizing the free resources to provide the higher computational and data power. Over the last decade, significant resources and research efforts have been devoted towards making this vision a reality and have lead to the development and deployment of a number of Grid infrastructures targeting a variety of applications where the large processing power is needed or where we have to deal with large data. Big software companies such as Oracle and SAP already either have products (Oracle 10g) or pilot programs (as SAP does) for grid-enabled applications in place. Grid Computing can provides the ability to process and fulfill orders faster; to analyze real-time business data to accelerate decision making; to maintain better synchronization between the demand and supply and much more.
So when are you going to invite grid to your SCM world!
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