Tackling Supply Chain Management Through High-Performance Computing: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Conversion of a supply chain to value chain requires agility, adaptability, communication, collaboration, decision support, elasticity, robustness, sensitivity, and visibility. High-Performance Computing (HPC) and cloud computing systems bring additional benefits of scalability, integration, portability, processing power, storage, and interoperability for Supply Chain Management (SCM). Mega corporations and retail giants like Wal-Mart and Pratt & Whitney have deployed HPC for SCM and thereby achieved efficient and effective data administration and analysis. But the usages of HPC for SCM are restricted to a few large enterprises. Deployment challenges include difficulty in migrating from legacy to high-end systems, high cost, lack of skilled manpower, and application software. HPC along with the cloud computing paradigm integrated in the Social Mobile Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) stack can emerge as a game changer to integrate all stakeholders in the value chain into a social network real-time and actionable intelligence. The access to updates and timely information from all supply chain partners will also transform enterprises to be forecast-driven as opposed to their conventional demand-driven nature.