Monday, September 2, 2013

Information Technology and forecasting in SCM

-Zhou (Joe) Ye

As we learnt in the first class, supply chain is flows of products, funds and information. And information is also one of the four drivers of supply chain. The second week's class is about forecasting. I'm quite interested in how information technology optimize supply chain management by making forecasting.

That's exactly how SCM is empowered by SAP, where I worked in the past 5 years. As an ERP solution provider, SAP focuses on collecting information from every aspect of business, modeling the business process and centralizing the whole enterprise management with its software solution. Supply chain management has always been the most important section in enterprise resource planning, especially for manufacturing business.

The SAP SCM module models the real supply chain processes into information system. It keeps collecting data from inventory, processing time, transportation cost, etc. Special algorithms are implemented in the software performing business intelligence functions to identify the bottleneck and issues in the whole process on the early stage by forecasting the potential consequences and send warnings to management team. (1)

Modern supply chain management is a very good example of combination of business and technology.I’ll try to incorporate my IT background into the study of SCM and make further inputs here.

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(1) G. Knolmayer, P. Mertens, A. Zeier - Supply Chain Management Based on SAP Systems. Springer

1 comment:

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