IT Supply-Chain Synchronization

Introduction

Enterprises face the complex challenge of synchronizing the procurement of highly technical resources, with very different lead times and service life-cycles, in order to consistently deliver resilient, always available infrastructure services in the right-size at the lowest total cost.

Zypr enables enterprises to strengthen the alignment and synchronization of future resource commitments by increasing the forward-looking visibility for how resource pools' composition are projected to evolve in order to realize lowest total cost.

Determining Future Needs

Zypr performs a similar function as a MRP application, which automates much of the computational aspects necessary to build an executable production plan. MRP maintains a predefined bill-of-material (BOM) for all the components and raw material necessary to build a finished product. MRP will then translate those requirements into vendor orders to ensure components and raw material are available when needed, but in a preferred manner to minimize administrative and logistics costs (e.g., aggregating purchase orders into lots), total inventory levels and customer delivery lead times.

Although a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a very useful tool, it is primarily used to track the state of assets and changes to their configuration for purposes of delivering a reliable service — not a finished product. Both MRP and CMDB maintain complex list structures that have been previously determined as authorize, required, or preferred — a BOM in MRP and a configuration item (CI) in CMDB.

Both MRP and CMDB also provide forecasts, but with different levels of utility. MRP forecasts are based on expected order quantities and material lead times, whereas CMDB forecasts are based on historical CMDB data and events to which various mathematical techniques may be applied to to project a future event or state.

Zypr, in contrast, relies on derivative and combinatorial optimization techniques, of existing state and expected future events, in order to answer the question: "How should the future composition of a resource pool statefully evolve to satisfy future demand at the lowest total cost?"

Dynamic Bill-Of-Material

Zypr is uniquely able to answer that question without the need for a preconfigured bill-of-material (BOM), or its IT equivalent of predetermined hardware refresh schedules. Instead, Zypr dynamically identifies feasible solutions by simultaneously evaluating the complex inter-dependencies among the four primary resource types that compose a pool, and determines how to statefully evolve a pool's compositional mix that optimally minimizes total cost.

In effect, Zypr is dynamically creating and evolving the BOM, which is output as a Resource Requirements Forecast (RRF) and describes what resources are required, when, in what quantities, at what rate of utilization, and for how long of use (i.e., economic-life) that satisfies service demand.

In order to accomplish all of that, Zypr relies on a different mathematical model to more precisely describe the stateful behavior of pool resources.