Supply Chain Integration Program (SCIP)

Introduction:

Sandia's SCIP work has been in the area of supply chain management on the Demand Activated Manufacturing Architecture (DAMA) Project.   Sandia National Laboratories has been working  with the U.S. Integrated Textile Complex (ITC) which involves all four sectors of the industry (retail, apparel, textile, fiber) since 1993.  The primary work has been with the American Textile Partnership (AMTEX).

SCIP is a computer-based tool for supply and demand analysis that uses supply chain information exchanged among strategic business partners in a customer-supplier relationship. The goal is to benefit the supply chain partnership by analyzing the trade-offs among consumer demand, material availability, and resource capacity, in order to reduce the product time in the supply chain pipeline and to meet inventory and safety stock targets. SCIP will help U.S. ITC planners make collaborative business decisions by managing the interaction of production and inventory supply chain management to meet forecasted and unexpected demand for produced goods.

Benefits:

SCIP will:

• provide assistance to mid and high level planners.
• be a tool that considers time (and eventually capacity) constraints for all companies.
• be a tool that calculates a viable cooperative plan consisting of schedules and orders.
• provide planners with the ability to play out that plan consisting of schedules and  orders.
• generate and report to the user various measures of effectiveness, including required  capacity.

Capabilities:

With SCIP, a planner can perform "what if" analyses to assess the impact of various decisions in order to enhance supply chain performance for all strategic business partners. Potential "what if" analyses can assess alternative partnership scenarios or even the percentage of plant capacity reserved for a designated product line or preferred customer. This "what if" capability gives planners a way to examine possible outcomes of a business change without making costly investments.

The planner interacts with SCIP through an easy-to-use graphical interface to construct a simulated supply chain, design a business-case scenario, run the analysis, then view the graphical output results showing the performance of the entire supply chain. Different choices can be made for an alternative scenario and the analysis repeated. SCIP can be used at the supply chain level to identify potential bottlenecks and to develop supply chains to meet quick response goals for all partners.

SCIP analyzes a supply chain for cooperative solutions by passing demand-related information backward through the pipeline, and by passing manufacturing constraints and other supply-related information forward toward retail.

Applications:

• SCIP has been used within DOE at the Kansas City Plant on the Integrated Program and  Scheduling System (IPSS) by planners for weapons system production across the Nuclear  Weapons Complex
• SCIP has been piloted at Russell Corporation to aid in collaborative business planning  and decisions

References: 

See the following Web sites:

AMTEX:  Link is: http://amtex.sandia.gov

DAMA:  Link is:  http://www.dama.tc2.com

SCIP:  Link is: http://tc2.sandia.gov/sci2.html