PC Manufacturing Industry
A world Leader
The PC (Personal Computers) Manufacturing Industry is the fastest growing industry in the world. The industry has specific needs for supply chain management.
The specific characteristics of the PC (Personal Computer) manufacturing industry are:
• Fast obsolation of components
• Make to order
• High value small components
• High expectations from users in terns of fast delivery
• Mostly manufacturing out of USA to supply USA & worldwide demand
• Serialized components & tracking of the components is necessary
• Must comply with ‘Trade Agreement Act’ of USA to supply the product in USA
• Trend of ordering on net
The industry needs the following support
• Good on-line interactive user-friendly system to get orders online.
• Globally integrated supply-chain management & distribution system to fulfill the demand
• Warehouse Management system to take care of high value inventory.
• System for serial number tracking of components of components and finished products.
• System to manage obsolate components.
To fulfill the expectations from the system, two major PC manufacturers adopted different strategies:
• Manufacturer ‘A’ is USA based company, having manufacturing facilities in various countries. The manufacturer is the pioneer of "Lap-top" technology. The organization decided to run stand-alone systems designed to take care of the needs of the industry (e.g. MRP system etc). The stand-alone systems populate data in respective SAP tables by BDC run every day. SAP is used as a front-end to integrate all the stand-alone systems. This strategy gives excellent power of all the systems developed by various manufacturers and the organization has a wide choice to select or develop packages as per the needs. The disadvantage of this approach is that SAP looses its "Real Time" operating capability. Since the data is updated once a day, synchronization of the system is a major task. Many servers are supporting SAP systems in different zones. A master server is synchronizing the zonal servers once a day. This way all the SAP systems get faster response time, but again real time capability is sacrificed.
• Manufacturer ‘B’ is also a USA based company & also having manufacturing facilities worldwide. This manufacturer is the pioneer of "Computers" and has big market share in Servers and Personal Computers. This organization decided to modify SAP to suit needs of the industry. This approach gives "Real Time" power to the developed system. Many tables needed to be created and even some SAP tables were modified to suit the requirements. Many transactions were developed. But this made the system complicated and due to many additional tables, it is necessary to keep all the tables synchronized. Giving after-implementation support to SAP system is a big task in this approach. But as few other external systems are involved, cost on supporting various systems is minimum. A cluster of servers is used to give support to the system. All the servers are located at one place in USA and real time data is available.
• Global rollout in all the plans and sales offices will be finished by year 2002.
