Task parallelism in distributed supply organizations: a case study in the shoe industry

This paper describes the application of the parallel integration evaluation model (PIEM) in an industrial case study. The PIEM model is based on modelling the interactions among supply network parties. It generates the parallel configuration of production and supply servers yielding the minimum total production and supply time/cost for the system, Phi. The design solution recommended by the model obeys the tradeoff that parallelism introduces into the networked supply operating system: while direct-production/supply time Pi decreases, the overhead of interaction time among the networked parties, T, increases. The interaction time comprises two delay generating factors, limiting the implementation of massively parallel supply networks: the delay due to communication, negotiation, and coordination among the parties, K, and the congestion delay Gamma at shared resources in the supply network. These two types of delay factors are positively correlated with the network's degree of parallelism, psi, and they affect inversely the total production supply and delivery time of the organization. The PIEM model has been applied to the case of a globally distributed shoe supply network. The resulting recommendations yielded significant savings of about 35% of the annual operating costs. Following the success of this case study, the model has been generalized and implemented as a supply network design optimization tool.