Impact of Technology on SCM: A Brief History of IT for SCM
Enver Yücesan · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2016
The 1986 Annual Report of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was setting an ambitious goal: “Our goal is to connect all parts of an organization—the office, the factory floor, the laboratory, the engineering department—from desktop to data center. We can connect everything within a building; we can connect a group of buildings on the same site or at remote sites; we can connect an entire organization around the world. We propose to connect a company from top to bottom with a single network that includes the shipping clerk, the secretary, the manager, the vice president, even the president. 1 ” More importantly, this goal was not based on some “vaporware” but on a concrete enabling technology, namely a new generation of super minicomputers based on a single computer architecture, VAX. From small desktop machines to computer clusters, VAX-based machines would be fully compatible, use a uniform operating system, and communicate across shared networks. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.