Supply Chain Management (SCM)

Businesses are implementing advanced supply chain management systems as they seek to:

• Achieve greater economies of scale,
• Leverage the capabilities of suppliers as business partners, and
• Reduce inventory costs and production lead times.

Data integration between disparate systems is an absolute prerequisite to meeting SCM requirements for success.

Sophisticated supply chain systems must be able to not only update and control data sources enterprise-wide, they must also be able to access and provide information to and from suppliers' operational systems - automatically and transparently.

For example, it's not uncommon for a supplier's systems to be able to access inventory levels at customer locations and automatically schedule replenishment shipments of products to each location. And do this on a just-in-time basis to reduce inventory costs.

Supplying SCM Solutions the Data They Need

The robust data integration capabilities of dbSpaces make it an ideal complement to SCM systems in supplying and accessing the enterprise information required.

dbSpaces features the following capabilities critical to supporting SCM systems:

• The ability to access, view, manage, replicate, update, query and deploy any information on any systems, regardless of location, data type or format.
• Data Location Transparency so end-users can request information without knowing the data source or the physical location of the data.
• Real-time data access to any data source to enable fast response to vendor's requirements.
• Data plug'n'play capability, allowing data sources to be added or removed with the dbSpaces Designer without the need for coding.
• Transparently integrate vendor's data sources with existing applications or use your old databases with vendor's applications easily, eliminating the long lead times and high costs of writing data integration code.
• Snapshots of data at specific times can be captured for trend analysis.
• Security features that govern user authorization privileges, enable audit tracking of changes for security, and to protect vendor's proprietary information.
• Ability to alias table and column names which may not be suitable for reporting (legacy, flat/JSON files or COBOL).
• Provide access to virtual views of information, allowing users to see a result set that is an aggregation of information that doesn't exist in one specific database.
• Access multiple data sources simultaneously, as if they were a single data source.
• Replication capability to distribute information to suppliers' systems.
• Events and Alerts capability to enable business logic functionality, such as initiating automatic orders when inventory levels reach a certain point.
• Persistent Messaging capability to ensure that data exchanges not only take place successfully but occur only once, compensating for network and system outages.

Ultimately the successful implementation of an SCM system depends on its ability to access and exchange the information each participant needs to maintain the supply chain efficiently and accurately. dbSpaces is an essential component to ensure the success of your SCM applications.