1. Composite Supply Chain Applications
- Author
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Danielle Manning, Thomas R. Gulledge, and Scott Hiroshige
- Subjects
Commercial software ,Process management ,Software suite ,business.industry ,Vendor ,Business process ,Computer science ,Supply chain ,business ,Competitive advantage ,Enterprise resource planning ,Enterprise software - Abstract
A number of commercial software vendors sell supply chain software suites that cover essentially all needs of the enterprise. For example, a vendor’s product can handle everything from creating an order, to logistics planning for that order, to logistics execution of that order, and finally to financial settlement. Allowing a single software suite to enable all supply chain-related transactions has some significant benefits including reduced integration costs, improved data integrity, and increased process optimization; however, the reality is that many organizations explicitly choose not to perform all of their transactions in a single software suite. Instead, supply chain processes are almost always executed across a heterogeneous system landscape, often involving communications among systems that were not designed to communicate with each other. Akin to the system landscape decision is the decision of how to implement business processes. There are some business processes in which no competitive advantage is gained from “doing things your own way”; for example, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software has optimized the processing of payroll to the point where a customized payroll process probably will not give you much of an edge over the non-customized competition. However, there are other business processes where innovation can provide a competitive advantage; for example, in the 1980s Wal-Mart enhanced its logistics operations with crossdocking and gained an operational advantage over other retailers. Process innovation is widely acknowledged as a means of increasing business value (Davenport, 1992). In such cases, a single unmodified commercial software product might not support the customized process, and the question becomes how to best develop a solution supporting the customized process while keeping interfacing and interface maintenance costs under control. In recent years, a number of enterprise software vendors have put forward offerings in the genre we call “Model-to-Execution.” These offerings provide a viable means of designing and implementing custom solutions in a manner that is economical in terms of both implementation and maintenance costs. We begin by presenting our hypothesis and briefly introducing the concept of Model-toExecution. We then discuss the case study that is used to test the hypothesis and the solution that was designed and implemented via Model-to-Execution. Finally, we describe the benefits of Model-to-Execution for organizations and discuss some of our lessons learned from testing the hypothesis.
- Published
- 2011