Benchmark Demonstrates Strong Performance to Help Supply Chain Planners Deal with Risk and Uncertainty of Demand Over High Inventory Costs ~ Underscores Reasons Why SPARC/Solaris is a Preferred Platform for i2 SPM
Sun Microsystems announced today a benchmark configuration with i2 Technologies, Inc. (OTC: ITWO) running i2 Service and Parts Management (SPM) on the Sun Fire 6800 midframe server. Testing i2 SPM on the bedrock of Sun technology –the Solaris Operating System and UltraSPARC[r] architecture– engineers simulated a time-phased forecast, inventory and replenishment plan for 10.1 million part locations, and generated an end-to-end plan over a 90-day horizon in one hour, 31 minutes, with peak planning throughput recorded at two-point-seven billion part location periods per hour. Today’s announcement means a typical service supply chain business, channelling tens of thousands of items (SKUs) to hundreds of locations, can improve forecast accuracy, and optimize inventory required to meet customer demand and service level agreements.
i2 Service and Parts Management, a web-based solution, is designed to enable companies to maximize the utilization of parts, budgets and facilities to reach key performance objectives such as high customer service, low operating costs, improved margins and overall market leadership. Leveraging the solution on the Solaris OS can provide high availability and scalability, so businesses can have peace-of-mind knowing the right parts are on hand in the right location at the right time. To accomplish this task, i2 SPM utilizes business logic specific to the service and aftermarket parts industry with a three-tiered workflow:
- Forecasting – i2 SPM can forecast demand for spare parts based on historical data, equipment usage and failure rates;
- Inventory Planning – i2 SPM can set target inventory levels for service parts based on cost, parts criticality and budgetary constraints; and,
- Replenishment Planning – i2 SPM can generate replenishment plans that consider the forecast for repairable and returned parts, as well as the possibility of substituting alternate parts.
Several real-world scenarios, ranging from two million to 10 million part locations, were tested running i2 Service and Parts Management v6.0.3 on two Sun Fire 6800 midframe servers with 24 x 1050 MHz CPU power and, Sun StorEdge T3 arrays (with 9 x 72 GB drives per array). The complete planning process (including forecasting, inventory and replenishment planning) was accomplished in one hour, 31 minutes. Significantly, the replenishment planning process was successfully completed within 20 minutes with only 24 CPUs, and helps demonstrate the i2 SPM capabilities for timely solving large scale service parts and retail replenishment planning problems running on the SPARC/Solaris platform.
The benchmark was generated in Sun’s Newark, Calif., Customer Benchmark Center to emulate typical supply planning needs of the world’s largest distribution and parts managments centers. Benchmark results can be highly influential as customers weigh price and performance — along with trust, reliability and ROI — when selecting mission critical solutions to power their business.
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