Innovations in Information Systems for Business Functionality and Operations Management

Innovations in Information Systems for Business Functionality and Operations Management belongs to Advances in Operations Research and Information Systems series book project. There are nine sections and 19 chapters in this book. After more than ten years of industry-based testing, they delivered to users a new method called Software as a Service (SaaS). This approach allows anyone access to the MODS algorithm located on a remote server using only a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. There is no implementation of MODS on local computing systems and access is immediate. Essentially, the algorithm serves as a calculator and does not store any data from the spreadsheet on the server. An important feature of the approach is its unique way of accomplishing machine understandable semantics to describe the inputs, outputs, and attributes of a mathematical model. The M Language dictionary provides machine-understandable semantics for describing data fields that are inputs to MODS. In this way, there can be no misunderstanding regarding the type of data needed to run the model or the meaning of various calculations required for input data. The M Language is also the standard for XML data transfers between the spreadsheet and the algorithm or any other target. This makes the data interoperable. Ultimately, the goal of the OSMPS is to have many models load on a server, accessible through a simple interface distributed to users. This provides central control over versions of the code while giving users the flexibility of experimenting with different models for a specific problem. Currently , ERP systems employ a single model to solve practical problems like production scheduling. This limits the ability to experiment. Their upcoming article in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, published by Reed Elsevier, builds on the chapter. It is often a challenge to get practitioners in agriculture to use data and mathemati