10.(TCO D) How are RFID systems used in inventory control and supply chain manag

Question

10.(TCO D) How are RFID systems used in inventory control and supply chain management?

11.(TCO D) What is cloud computing and how do you think its developments could impact businesses?

12.(TCO D) What are the business advantages of using voice over IP (VOIP) technology?

13.(TCO E) Distinguish between grid computing, cloud computing, and utility computing.

14.(TCO E) What additional complexities are faced in global supply chains? How does the Internet help in managing global supply chains?

15.(TCO E) Explain why standards are so important in information technology? What standards have been important for the growth of Internet technologies?

16.(TCO F) Differentiate between intangible and tangible benefits and list three examples of each. In what types of systems are intangible benefits more predominant?

Explanation / Answer

10.) In inventory control and supply chain management, RFID systems capture and manage more detailed information about items in warehouses or in production than bar coding systems. If a large number of items are shipped together, RFID systems track each pallet, lot, or even unit item in the shipment. This technology may help companies improve receiving and storage operations by enhancing their ability to "see" exactly what stock is stored in warehouses or on retail store shelves.

11.) At its highest level of impact, cloud computing is ushering in an era in which enterprises themselves will become virtual, not just their IT infrastructures. Corporations will in fact be managing complex ecosystems of cloud providers, IT suppliers and business process outsourcers, as well as a host of other parties, both internal and external.

This is another reason why the ability to provide innovation, and not just cost reductions, will be critical to competitive differentiation in the IT and business services industry. Customers are becoming much more ambitious about wanting not only IT operational benefits from the cloud, but also business process and market innovations. These will only be possible by tapping more effectively into brain power, wherever it exists in the supplier and solutions ecosystem.

%u201CCloud computing is ushering in an era in which enterprises themselves will become virtual, not just their IT infrastructures%u2026This is why the ability to provide innovation, and not just cost reductions, will be critical to competitive differentiation in the IT and business services industry."

12.) Business advantages include:

1. A single network for voice and data rather that 2 separate ones. This is easier to set up and maintain but is a more sophisticated and costly network than a network for data only.

2. IP phones cost slightly more than pbx style phones but they are vendor interoperable which will ultimately reduce cost of these. IP PBX are usually less costly than conventional ones.

3. The network is used closer to its capacity - with voice getting first priority for packet flow and data is "back filling" the capacity.

4. A single IP phone can be unplugged from one location and plugged into another location on the business network, retain its extension number, and all will work without rewiring - very flexible and inexpensive.

5. Multilocation facilities with leased point to point lines link voice and data over the leased lines which makes it easy and less costly to link facilities over a common single network.

13.) The Pacific Ocean is a water body, but not all water bodies are Pacific Oceans. This may be oversimplifying the situation but you do get the drift. Grid computing and utility computing, though sharing several attributes with cloud computing, are merely subsets of the latter. They may also be considered as implementations of cloud computing, rather than being different names for the same technology.

Grid computing can be defined as the use of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. It can be considered as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads involving a large number of files, yet more loosely coupled, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed as compared to cluster computing. In its simplest form, grid computing may be represented as a %u201Csuper virtual computer%u201D composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform humongous tasks.

Utility computing involves the renting of computing resources such as hardware, software and network bandwidth on an as-required, on-demand basis. In other words, what were earlier considered products, are treated as services in utility computing. The idea was first propounded by American computer scientist John McCarthy of MIT as early as 1961, when he had said, %u201CIf computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility%u2026 The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry.%u201D

14.) Supply Chain Volatility and Uncertainty Have Permanently Increased

These %u201Cbuilding blocks%u201D are a necessary foundation to enable more advanced language and exchange interactions to become possible. It can be argued that with every new technology advance, a new language is needed to express and drive that new advance. Prior to the Internet, earlier standards of timeshare mainframes, virtual memory, ISA chip architecture and fiber optics established scale and increasing capacity to affect simple to more complex tasks. There simply was no universal protocol-based standards that could support the huge network of wired and wireless communications. Commercial-scale computing was locked and limited inside mainframe and PC computers.

With federated distributed computing standards, all that changed. The Client-Server era enabled cluster intranet and peer-to-peer networks. Email exchange, web access and data base access evolved to be across a number of computers and to connect groups of computers together for shared resource services. The web browser running as a client program at the user computer enables access to information at any web server in the world. So standards come and go, and evolve in cycles as existing technology matures and new technologies and capabilities evolve much like the cycles of innovation.

HTTP, TCP-IP, HTML, URL, MAC and XML standards are very important.

16.) Tangible value represents the benefits from the system that are quantifiable and measurable. Intangible value represents benefits that are real, but are difficult to quantify and measure. Examples of tangible benefits might be increased sales, reduced operating costs, reduced interest costs. Examples of intangible value might include increased customer satisfaction, improved decision making, improved problem recognition. Note that these intangible values are not necessarily impossible, but tend to be difficult to measure or even observe directly. Some firms will go to great lengths to measure intangible values like customer satisfaction in order to make them "more tangible" and, therefore, more accurately forecast.

Some workers value tangible benefits over intangible benefits and vice versa. Decisions regarding employment typically depend on a worker%u2019s situation. A father who wishes to stay at home with his children and telecommute places a premium on intangible benefits and may be willing to forego a higher salary. Another distinction of these two benefits is that intangible benefits may increase or decrease over time, whereas tangible benefits of a job tend not to fluctuate as much. If a worker tires of performing the same task repeatedly and sees no sign of advancement, her intangible benefits decreases.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse 1
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.