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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Phoenix who wrote (40965)	10/17/2000 4:29:47 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 77397

Well I'm not an MRP expert... its an old technology from the 60s, (revolutionary for its time) ... where you fed in a forecasting schedule to your system and out popped a purchasing schedule on the other side, so say you were building cars and forecasting 1 million car sales in may of next year, mrp would tell you to order each of the component parts when, so say engines in december and body in January, or if your facility was maxed at 100K production it would schedule incremental purchases of engines... the point being all this buying was optimized so you had the exact amt you needed to meet your forecast and no more. R2 was the precursor to the SAP product from the 80s, similar to R3 but it ran on a mainframe (I think)... then they ported to SQL and it became R3 with some enhancements. SAP is a good system with multi-currency and all, but it is NOT supply chain management which was invented by I2 (they get the credit anyway). SCM allows you to look into your trading partner's forecasting schedule and production schedule and its tools aggregate all this info and combine it with your own. Then you can piggyback off of their information to optimize your own. Prior to I2 it was amazing how many divisions of the same company had no idea what the other division was doing manufacturing-wise, for example. Dell did the most aggressive I2 implementation which really started up in 1996 or so, and slowly they squeezed every little margin out of the entire supply chain, compaq couldn't do this and lost money. Of course there is a lot to making a company besides mfg automation but Dell was able to build a quality product for cheaper based on the I2 implementation... Mike has stated this on numerous occasions. The customized I2 product is now being generalized as a part of b2b and itwo stock is rising on that promise, basically being able to do what Dell did (or some of what they did) for a lot of trading networks. Of course ariba and c1 and others are going after the same pie.