The management of efficient
inventory management IT systems is essential to supply chain optimization, as was
shown at Dell. The Dell supply chain
management database systems handle very important business functions that
support worldwide manufacturing supply chains, including the Dell inventory management
model and delivery of computers, accessories and supplies. Unreliability and a
lack of cost-efficiency in the Dell supply chain can cost thousands of dollars
per minute in factory time.
When Dell was a
smaller company, its IT group ran its supply chain database applications on
large, expensive servers. As the company grew, servers lacking the necessary
capacity had to be replaced with even larger, more powerful servers. The Dell
supply chain database handles a huge amount of transactions and pieces of information. The
inventory component manages more than 3 million inventory movements daily from
stock rooms to factory floors across all Dell sites, along with the corresponding
3 million messages transmitted to different systems for reporting, analysis, and
factory scheduling.
By 2005, many batch
processes were taking a long time to be completed. The Oracle
Database version was also outdated and unsupported. To continue using this system
would have called for a large investment in upgrading these large, expensive
servers. Dell decided to migrate to more cost-effective, standards-based PowerEdge
servers running Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g. This helped enhance database performance and allowed for scalability for future
growth.
By sharing a
large database across multiple servers, Dell can easily utilize additional
low-cost servers when necessary to handle increased workloads. Dell has implemented
this type of system for operations at multiple locations around the world. The most
significant time savings occurred in the data extraction for all material transactions,
which dropped from almost 5 hours to just 35 minutes, an 88 percent improvement.
The time for the entire end-of-quarter jobs processing also decreased from 31
hours to 23 hours.
Supply chain
management databases are essential to Dell operations around the world. Factory
operations and internal systems depend on these systems to provide real-time
information about important business functions and inventory management. By
moving the systems to Dell servers, significant additional spending on less
efficient proprietary servers was avoided and enhanced performance was attained.
It makes one
wonder….how can similarly efficient databases be used for optimization of the inventory
management processes of other companies within and outside of the IT field?
Sources
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