Challenges, strategies and metrics for supply-driven enterprises

Businesses today must maintain a laser-like focus on containing costs and increasing efficiencies in every possible way in order to generate profits and maintain competitiveness. Supply chain management (SCM) & optimization is a critical aspect of modern enterprises and an ever-green research area. IT dept plays a major role in the optimization of supply chains. This paper presents a critical review of IT methodologies for optimizing supply-driven chains which have complex inventory systems. The convergence of business unit and IT dept using state-of-art cloud technology is recently accepted as a solution to optimize such complicated supply chains. On the other hand, there is still ongoing debate on the choice of the model among private cloud, community cloud, public cloud and conventional Enterprise IT models. Specifically, it is not certain which model is the most appropriate for supply-driven enterprises. Google and Amazon argue that public cloud is a better choice from the perspective of resource management since public cloud provides the least elasticity. Business growth is the main objective of any enterprise. Resource Management is one of the parameters of business growth. Even though public cloud is an optimal model from the perspective of resource management, this paper states that community cloud is the most suitable model for supply-driven enterprises from the perspective of business growth. We conduct simulation experiments and demonstrate that community cloud is the optimal model to supply-driven enterprises.