Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
SLA-Evaluator notifies affected supply chain members about any violations that
occur. The result of the SLA evaluation is stored in the evaluation report database
and is accessible via the AgroGrid portal to supply chain members. The evaluation
report serves for checking the successful SLA fulfilment, and, in case of a detected
SLA violation it serves for the determination of penalty and compensation.
11.3 Added Value for the User
The described Grid computing concepts are used in AgroGrid in order to over-
come the previously introduced challenges of the food industry. These concepts
support important business objectives directly. From a user's point of view, this
section provides an answer to what a user obtains from using AgroGrid, and what
changes are needed in a user's daily work as well as in existing infrastructure to
employ AgroGrid.
11.3.1 Application of Grid Concepts or: Why Grid?
Grid concepts in AgroGrid are used to break up traditional fixed boundaries in
food supply chains in order to enable dynamic supply chain composition and to
in crease the exploitation of production capacities. Besides, Grid concepts offer
suitable solutions for composition and monitoring of supply chains. This means
having Grid concepts ensuring an efficient and gap-free quality monitoring by using
widely distributed data and, at the same time, helping to secure data ownership. Grid
improves scalability of the overall solution - a very important characteristic against
the background of the market size and the amount of traded goods.
The maintenance of accurate data for all partners is a crucial demand of compa-
nies employing tracking and tracing solutions. While competitors in the market of
tracking and tracing software solutions are numerous, these solutions often follow
a central database approach (see table 11.2). One of the biggest success factors
of TraceTracker's GTNet® is the distributed data management. A main challenge
during the implementation of AgroGrid was to grasp data from these distributed
traceability information exchange databases in order to detect SLA violations and
to generate a SLA report.
Table 11.2: Competitors in the market of tracking and tracing software solutions
Competitor
Solution
Difference to GTNet/ AgroGrid
Trace One
Lifecycle management
Central Database
FXA
Internal traceability
Internal Database only
Historic Futures
Supply chain traceability
Central data registry
Yotta Mark
Product traceability and authentication
Central Database
Beside data management issues, Grid allows collaborative resource sharing across
parties allocated all over the world and enables building of dynamic Virtual
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