SCM (Supply Chain Management) comprises a rapidly growing market with its main emphasis being on supplier collaboration opportunities coupled with inventory optimisation and process efficiencies across the supply chain. Any supply chain today – regardless of the sector it serves – is made up of an increasingly labyrinthine network of materials, equipment and services suppliers requiring efficient management for its smooth, cost effective and successful operation.
 
The Grid offers a unique opportunity for providing a reliable, scalable and robust infrastructure able to support efficient inventory management and fast order processing and scheduling. One such case study involved inventory management and order processing in the pharmaceutical business sector. This Grid product provides a solution to the service providers’ struggle with infrastructure and operational delivery issues in their search for a reliable mechanism to allow them to remain profitable while they focus on customer demands for ever-increasing service levels.

Fact Sheet

• BE10 - Collaborative Environment in the Supply Chain Management for Pharmaceutics - Fact Sheet
• BE10 - Collaborative Environment in the Supply Chain Management for Pharmaceutics - Case Study

Challenges

SCM comprises an example of a strongly collaborative environment. A complex network of geographically dispersed trading partners (suppliers, distributors, retailers, manufacturers, and customers) with different needs but all following a 4Rs rule – Right quantity, Right quality, Right time, Right price – has to be served. Effective inventory management, efficient production scheduling and fast order processing comprise inter-related problems and all rely on one important thing; real-time (or near real-time) information exchange within the enterprise as well as with trusted trading partners. Hence, an efficient procurement operation through a reliable and scalable infrastructure provides opportunities to drive down costs and increase profits. Even if all the parties engaged in a business collaboration model (especially SMEs) agree upon the need of a web based integrated solution, they often fail to smoothly integrate their enterprise systems to work effectively with each other. The reasons are usually: long deployment cycles, high costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructure demanded by traditional software applications.

Solution

One of the primary features of next-generation SCM is demand-supply synchronization. The Grid comprises a promising infrastructure which aggregates and coordinates various resources, from computing power and storage to applications and human expertise, serving users with different QoS (Quality of Service) requirements. Through the optimized use of the existing infrastructure it offers, productivity is increased since all the parties can access the resources they request when they actually need them. And most importantly, data sharing across the enterprise and with trusted trading partners is enabled allowing for the collaboration among different entities – organizations or businesses.
 
The case study carried out focuses on the pharmaceutical business sector. Different entities (suppliers, distributors, pharmacies) accessed information related to their role in the supply chain and their network of collaborating companies. A customized portal offered per role access to the Grid e-Procurement services to the different users of the system through which stock management and order processing capabilities were validated.

Business Impact

The business impact stemming from the adoption of Grid in SCM procurement operations includes:

• Improved quality: Faster execution of operations, supply-demand synchronization, access to the information each trading partner is interested in through customised portals and collection of real-time business data,
• Increased affordability and flexibility: trading partners do not have to invest capital for owning the application, but rather pay based on their level of participation in the collaboration and resource usage, resulting in reduced depreciation costs because less hardware is required.

• Increased reliability: failure points creating a service outage (such as rush hours system overloading, system being down for application upgrades or hardware failure) are handled through workload balancing and replication techniques offering greater operational confidence.

Perspectives

Benefits

The benefits for companies that adopt this Grid solution include:

• Real-time e-collaboration among people and technological resources;
• Minimization of the cost for faxing requests to suppliers;
• More efficient stock management, through electronic stock monitoring;
• Ability to process and fulfill orders faster;
• Ability to analyze real-time business data to accelerate decision making;

Partners