Supply chain management (SCM) concerns the management of the entire value-added chain, from the supplier to manufacturer right through to the retailer and the final customer. Its primary goals focus on reducing inventory, boosting the transaction speed by exchanging data in real-time, and increasing sales by implementing customer requirements more efficiently.
This business experiment aims at validating a Grid-based collaborative environment in the area of supply-chain management, using a paradigm taken from the pharmaceutical business sector.
The aforementioned sector comprises of numerous key business segments, including pharmaceutical manufacturers, pharmaceutical and medical/surgical supply wholesalers, major pharmacy chains and healthcare providers to begin the process of standardizing the complete, front-end to back-end pharmaceutical supply chain management. The proposed collaborative environment will integrate demand and supply side processes between buyers and sellers, which will allow the cooperation and exchange of information between all interested parties related with processes of sales, supplies and orders. Specifically, the Grid-based experiment focuses on automating and standardizing communication, cooperation and sharing of information between providers, retailers and distributors regarding the supply chain procedures from start to finish.

Fact Sheet

What is the experiment about?

The proposed experiment concerns the development of a Grid-based collaborative environment, which will standardize, and refine the procedures and inter-relations of partners involved in supply-chain management. Although the enterprise domain the experiment will be the pharmaceutical business sector, one of the main guidelines of the experiment will be the development of a truly expansible and general-purpose platform in which future members can easily join.

Why this experiment? (objective)

The objective of this experiment is the validation of a Grid-based collaborative environment in the area of supply-chain management, adjusting and applying the results of the experiment to the pharmaceutical business sector. More specifically, it aims at identifying, collecting and analyzing the requirements for grid-enabling the Supply Chain Management in the pharmaceutical sector, providing the Grid middleware, migrating the SCM application into this new collaborative platform, validating the functionality of current grid technology for SCM and evaluating the impact of the utilization of Grid technologies in the application domain of SCM.

Industrial input/added-value of this experiment

The specific BEinGRID business experiment will support collaborative procurement processes, through the enhancement and modernization of business models for the end-users involved in the value chain. This enhancement of business processes passes through the provision of ubiquitous access to Grid resources preserving at the same time the applied policies and the Service Level Agreements between the participants, the efficiency in the management of the workflows and ergonomics, factors which are of crucial importance.

How is this experiment going to be handled?

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