As of February 1995, Digital Equipment Corporation stood as the third largest vertically integrated computer company in the world. In the early 1990's, Digital's annual revenues exceeded ten billion dollars serving eighty-two countries including the United States. Given such a large customer base, Digital uses the Global Supply Chain Model (GSCM) to determine manufacturing and distribution strategies and also to examine supply chain alternatives. The GSCM program which has saved Digital over one hundred million dollars utilizes a mixed-integer linear methodology that integrates a global multi-product bill of materials for supply chains and a model of worldwide manufacturing and distribution decisions.
Companies that face very short product life cycles and extremely fast technological advancement find GSCM ideally suited to their supply and demand decision-making tasks and also find GSCM
The GSCM model exhibits a special structure that allows the user to specify how much it would cost to violate a particular constraint. Elastic penalties help the firm decide which constraints have some flexibility and which should be respected firmly. The solver temporarily ignores inconsequential constraints in order to assemble a solid solution and then readjusts it to an optimal global solution by attending to the less important details. The model employs row factorization to simplify computations of balancing inputs and outputs at each individual point in the GSCM supply chain. GSCM knows to differentiate products based on cost per unit and profit per unit when scheduling production. The solver uses branch-and-bound enumeration which chains together costs associated with chain reaction decision outcomes. Finally, GSCM makes note of particular successes and failures allowing users to
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