SCOR

SCOR



SCOR

Introduction

For a number of enterprises, past investments in IT infrastructure have failed to deliver on promised business benefits and have resulted instead in increased integration costs of point technologies. Consequently, the CIOs demand [BEA 2003] that any future IT investment should be aligned with the business objectives of an enterprise, and the operational efficiencies gained should be measurable against the business metrics of interest. The shift from pure technology consulting to a combination of business and technology consulting requires a change in the consulting engagement processes as well as development of suitable tools to support it. These tools should provide a link between the established operational business models and the IT solutions components.

This paper reports on the results of extending the industry standard, supply chain operations reference model (SCOR) and the application of a scorecard procedure that computes the likely impact of supply chain solution components on the SCOR business metrics. First, we introduce the original SCOR model and discuss existing associations between the elements of the model relevant to the problem. We then discuss minimal extension to the model required to relate an IT solution to business performance indicators. In the following section a plausible method for the calculation of business impact of a given IT solution is given and the assumptions made are outlined. Finally, we discuss the results and make recommendations for further work in the area.

Original SCOR Model

The Supply Chain Operations Reference-model (SCOR) has been developed by the Supply- Chain Council (SCC) as the cross-industry standard for the supply-chain management. The model prescribes a set of processes templates and their decomposition into more detailed set of tasks. The main model elements and the relationships of interest are shown in Figure 1, for further information see the SCOR guide (SCOR, 251). On the first level of detail, processes within the supply chain domain are classified into Source, Make, Deliver, Return as well as Plan and Enable process types.

The later two process types are meta-processes and specify planning or enabling activities for the former four process types. The second level gives a register of configurable method templates (e.g. “Make-to supply” or “Make-to-Order”) that can be selected when modelling a exact provide string of links instance. Level three processes specify task inputs and outputs (process interdependencies), business metrics that can be collected for a given task as well as best practices for task implementation that should result in the improvement of business performance indicators.

Each metric is associated with exactly one out of five performance attributes (Assets, Costs, Responsiveness, Flexibility and Reliability). Like processes, metrics are classified into a number of levels but these do not necessarily correspond to the process levels. The thirteen levels I metrics, (e.g.”Perfect Order Fulfilment”) are high level business measures that are of interest to the supply chain managers. It should be noted that a given metric can have multiple associations with processes on various levels depending on whether the metric calculation requires data carried by the process (Rolf, ...