Caso Practico

Fine Cola is a medium-sized enterprise that produces and distributes soft drinks to retailers across the
country. It owns a production plant and several strategically located distribution centers. Fine Cola has a
range of customer types from nationwide foodstore chains to small local outlets. The foodstore chains
normally maintain fixed orders though changes can be made at delivery time. Small local outlets often
restock directly from the delivery truck with no previous order made. Order quantities can vary, peaking
in the warmer season and during holidays.

The process from ordering of the raw materials to the delivery of the finished product and the return of
empties consists of a number of subprocesses: inventory, purchase ordering or raw materials,
production, supply to distribution centers, and delivery. All of these subprocesses are interdependent
and activities in one subprocess are often triggered by an event in another. For example, ordering of a
raw material is automatically triggered when inventory discovers that the amount of the raw material
currently held in the warehouse has hit the reorder level.

The challenge

Fine Cola uses Tivoli Workload Scheduler to manage the timing and interdependencies of its production
and supply process. However, in some areas problems are occurring with computer resource allocation:

Some scheduled jobs are experiencing long wait times before resources become available.

Performance problems are occurring as some resources become overloaded.

When a resource that normally runs workload is removed temporarily or permanently, the job
definitions must be manually changed to target a new resource.

Tivoli Workload Scheduler uses fixed resource allocation and this is presenting Fine Cola with the choice
of either acquiring more resources or constantly running the risk that jobs will not be completed in a
timely manner.

The problems are particularly evident during the end-of-day reconciliation process. This process starts
when the last delivery truck returns and must be completed before the next day's delivery route
planning can be started. The main focus of the end of day processing is the daily transaction database.
This database includes a wide variety of transactions including consignment transactions for each item
in a customer order, consignment transactions for each delivery load, receipt transactions for returned
items, receipt transactions for empties, adjustments transactions to customer billing when the order
amount has been changed on delivery. These transactions are used to update the following databases:
customer orders and billing, inventory, and general ledger.

Within a small time window, the following tasks must be completed

Update the inventory database with returned items.

Update the inventory database with returned empties.

Update customer orders and billing database to take account of changes to orders and to create orders
and billing for customers who have restocked from the truck.

Update the general ledger database.

Produce several reports of varying levels of detail of transactions by item, by customer, and by delivery
route to enable analysis of the profitability of product lines and routes. Save these reports in the
management reports database.