Abstract
A proper Product Development System is key to higher profit and better resource management. The system is basically an active control program through which all the three aspects of business i.e., sales, purchases and business. Introduction of IT enabled grid technology would bring a new era into the process meant for managing inventories. Such an advance use of technology in inventory and product development would yield better, accurate and fast management. Grid technology would result an amalgamated utilization of different programs with sole purpose to maintain the smooth flow of business through integrating the growing needs with the trends of online businesses. The document has been prepared to provide a superficial details related to application of grid technlogy in managing inventories and how could the future of inventory gets improved further due to grid computing.
Introduction
The Semantic Web Technologies have made an impact on the business processes including product development and inventory management. It helps factories to have better efficiency and at the same time allows better use of capital. It also helps in the elimination of waste and enables it to build and deliver products to customer specification.. As in this globalised world an organisation has developed its production at various locations and to manage the inventory with multiple locations, application of grid technology in inventory management can help in boosting organisation’s capability in managing availability of raw materials in each of its manufacturing units and hence smooth functioning of the production unit as a whole. (Hendricks, Singhal, & Stratman 2007)
Background Review
Today’s competitive environment requires product development through extensive collaboration among engineers and other members from many departments across organization’s technical team as well as network of suppliers. Grid technology based production development and inventory management would flourish the concept of inventories with an array of production units present at multiple locations. To manage functioning of all these production units as per as presence of required raw material, an intelligent network based real time database management system will be required. (Laforenza 2002)
Getting the most synchronized data related to raw materials and the required workforce is the most efficient way of proper utilization of human capital along with machines. Intra-departmental communication and data sharing could be made easier. All details would now be available through 2-way communication process and in case of emergency will be done during real time data transfer. Some of the basic features associated with this technology are cost saving, time saving, reduced IT costs and finally reduced Co-location costs. The increased data sharing and process data flow integration and speed of accessing documents saves several Man-hours. This will cause considerable reduction in the overall cost of organisation’s expenditure in IT deployment and maintaining the same. The Co-location costs are greatly reduced with reduction in travel costs and less need of relocation cost. (Frey 2001)
Finally the auxiliary expenditures in form of printing of documents, audio and video-conferencing and information transmission can now be reduced to minimum possible range. Another main feature of this system is that though it is a network and a collection of wired computers with the clients being independent computers. But still the whole system appears as a single coherent system. And the concept of World Wide Web is that the whole information and data it possesses has been made public in form of document. (Cohen 2010)
Personal Recommendation
Multi natioal Companies in this globalised world have designed a very efficient way of manageing a balance of production cost and selling price. Factories are being set up at cheaper locations so that cost of production could be reduced and at the same mass scale production of goods could be achieved. But this cost effectiveness in production requires proper management of the above mentioned seperate units which includes availability of raw materials, installation of machines and their maintenance and how could synchronization be brought in the functioning of three basic units of business management i.e, sales, purchase and logistics. (Eerola 2003)
The Grid Technologty based Inventory Management and Product development system could play a very important role is proper functioning of production units of organization present at multiple locations. It would also enables improved comunication between the purchase, logistics and supply chain and results perfect product delivery. The data related to raw materials and finished products can be manitained through real time channels. This data once transferred to analytical data base, can then be analyzed through analysis tools and expert analytical resources. This actually results in the maintenance of production of new products and management of raw material and production tools. (Kesselman, Foster, & Tueke 2001)
Conclusion
Inventory and production management has a history iof inculcating changes so that new ways to improve its performance and customer satisfaction but the same techniques sometimes become a revolution. Initially it was assembly line production and now its use of information technology for its business processes. The use of Grid Computing based IT structure could cause remarkable change in the production technique and supply chain management. It also stretched its utility to proper management of its workforce. The company as a whole will be near to both its employee and its customer. The development of IT and its application in Inventories being a continuous affair has changed not only the firm but also the IT structure over which the company is changing its way of conducting business. ( Foster, Kesselman, Nick & Tueke 2002)
References
Kesselman, C, Foster, I & Tueke, S 2001’The anatomy of the grid-enabling scalable virtual organizations’. The International Journal of Supercomputer Applications, 15(3), p.200-222
Cohen, R 2010 ‘Cluster and Grid Computing in Japan: Today and in 2010’
Eerola, P 2003 ‘Building a production grid in scandinavia’. IEEE Internet Computing, 7(4), p.27-35
Foster, I, Kesselman, C, Nick, J & Tuecke, S 2002 ‘The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems Integration’
Frey, J 2001 ‘A computation management agent for multi-institutional grids’. In 10th International Symposium on High Performance distributed Computing, p. 55-56
Hendricks, K, Singhal, V, Stratman, J 2007 ‘The impact of enterprise systems on corporate performance: A study of ERP, SCM, and CRM system implementations’. Journal of Operations Management, v 25, n 1, p 65-82
Laforenza, D 2002 ‘Grid programming: some indications where we are headed’. ACM Parallel Computing Special Issue: Advanced environments for parallel and disributed computing, p 1733-1752