http://www.hcltech.com/travel-transportation-logistics/overview~ More on Travel Event Driven Supply Chain - A methodology of transformation enabled by complex event processing technology, providing a platform for enhanced supply chain collaboration. The solution provides a mechanism for automation in strategic and tactical decision making by correlating real-time events of individual players of the chain. This paper seeks to explore applications of the Complex Event Processing technology in monitoring, managing and enhancing future Supply Chains, through real-time correlation of events, timely reaction and response to business scenarios, incidents and exceptions, and real-time routing of alerts and incidents to people within organizational hierarchies. The idea is to reduce latency in decision making through a proactive intelligent system that works like the human mind, captures the situational snapshot of the enterprise at any moment in time and maximizes business benefi t through the ability to respond to a business situation in the shortest possible time.

2. Event Driven Supply Chains | September, 2009
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract 3
Background 4
Business Need 4
Complex Event Processing: The Concept 5
The Solution: Advanced Control Tower (ACT) 7
Components of ACT 8
Benefits 9
About HCL 11
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3. Event Driven Supply Chains | September, 2009
ABSTRACT
Until just a few years ago, decision–making relied on paper-based processes,
the human mind and a basic medium of communication. Today the
decisions we make are based on what our systems reveal to us and how
best they provide us the data and information in the right views. But with
greater information come greater responsibilities. The larger the volume of
information captured, the longer the list of parameters for our managers to
correlate and manage, resulting in a greater risk of making mistakes. Imagine
we had a system that automatically correlated mind-boggling volumes of
data and information, enabled managers to instantly understand underlying
operational and business cause and effects, prompted timely responses from
supply chain participants, triggered automated sequences of actions and was
an intelligent system that learnt over time just like we did, and scaled up to
the requirements of the supply chain operations and activities. Imagine the
possibilities of the efficiencies in decision making that could be achieved
using such an intelligent system. No, this is not science fiction but a peek
into the possible transformations that technology is enabling for the next
generation of supply chains.
This paper seeks to explore applications of the Complex Event Processing
technology in monitoring, managing and enhancing future Supply Chains,
through real-time correlation of events, timely reaction and response to
business scenarios, incidents and exceptions, and real-time routing of alerts
and incidents to people within organizational hierarchies. The idea is to
reduce latency in decision making through a proactive intelligent system
that works like the human mind, captures the situational snapshot of the
enterprise at any moment in time and maximizes business benefit through
the ability to respond to a business situation in the shortest possible time.
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4. Event Driven Supply Chains | September, 2009
BACKGROUND
The supply chain domain has seen significant transformational change over
the last few years. Starting from the way in which businesses are transacted
and data and information are managed to the manner customers and partners
collaborate, share and respond to supply chain situations. Technology
has been the single strongest enabler with offerings such as enterprise
applications, sensor edge technologies, middleware and integration adapters,
visibility and tracking solutions, and now with concepts such as the web
2.0, the IT enabled transformational direction is only becoming steeper
and more advanced. Since supply chains require strong collaboration and
pervasiveness of information among the various participants, systems have
been on-boarded and integrated inconsistently and the supply chain IT
landscape has become a hotchpotch of multiple vendor applications and
legacy systems. As a result, visibility and the lack of a single source of
truth continue to challenge the efficient operations of supply chains. The
siloed nature of organizations and partner collaboration issues have also
contributed to this problem and resulted in distributed control of the supply
chain. If a supply chain is to behave as an individual unit, respond to market
demand in the most agile manner, and keep efficiencies high and costs low,
the one way to do it is to have a system enabling this centralized control. So,
here we are talking about a mechanism, enabled by an IT tool, where the
different members of the supply chain, act as different departments of ‘One’
organization, and enhance the operations of the ‘One’ supply chain.
BUSINESS NEED
Players in supply chains operate on wafer-thin margins, and look to develop
efficiencies through collaboration with other partners in the supply chain.
A Supply Chain member’s performance is as much dependent on the other
participants within the chain, as on the internal operations of the member.
The supply chain system leans heavily on Visibility, Predictability and
Optimization in order to stay viable and compete as a powerful force in
the market place. Precision, accuracy of information, and a single source of
truth is of utmost importance in making impactful decisions for all players
of the chain. The efficiency of a supply chain is dependent upon how quickly
each individual participant can respond to disparate events, and take timely
action that is local to that individual’s enterprise.
Some of the key drivers for an Event Driven Supply Chain include:
Situational Visibility across operational and transactional landscapes
There is a need for each member of the supply chain to obtain a real-time
snapshot of the high-level critical operations and transactions that occur
upstream and downstream. Often, metrics shared and made available
across the participants of the chain, provide a delayed snapshot of the
system. This retrospect nature of the picture diminishes the value that
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5. Event Driven Supply Chains | September, 2009
can correspondingly be derived from the information, thus negating the
impact of collaboration and sharing of information. Information has a
lifetime, and its value declines at an increasing steep rate, against time.
Centralized control of supply chain operations
With services spanning multiple regions of the globe, it becomes a
challenge of immense magnitude for the organizations of the supply chain
to centrally control operations and activities. The tracking of statistical
parameters that impact the overall supply chain performance also become
difficult to detect. Often, the strategic decision making process is hindered
or flawed due to the lack of accurate numbers or even the presence of
incorrect parameters of measure. Centralization of the supply chain is a
mighty task, considering that centralization of operations even within an
organization is still a major challenge.
Correlation of data and information in near real-time, to reveal
decision enhancing business insights to managers
Correlating and making relevant business sense of the massive volumes
of operational, transactional and financial data and information that is
captured by the systems across a supply chain is by all means an impossible
task for logistics managers. Often, information is overseen or not taken
into account due to lack of co-relational insight by business managers,
resulting in exceptions, business threats and critical incidents, that later
become mountains of challenges to conquer.
Proactive response to impending business situations
In current business situations, any exception or threat requires and deserves
an instant response. Delays in responding to critical situations are the
major causes for customer dissatisfaction and operational inefficiencies. A
responsive and alerting mechanism tracking the occurrence of an event,
prompting an action, triggering processes, and broadcasting a record of
the incident across the supply chain to other players, helps in another
player benefiting from making a corresponding timely adjustment, thus,
mitigating a devastating impact on downstream operations.
COMPLEX EVENT PROCESSING: THE CONCEPT
Let’s take a look at what Complex Event Processing has to offer us. As the
term suggests, it is the processing of complex events. In business parlance,
an Event is an occurrence of significance that one would want to track
within the enterprise. There is a start and a definite end to every event. As
much as “it is raining” is an event, a shipment delivery confirmation receipt
is also an event. Associated with an event are attributes that characterize
and define the event. In the case of the ‘raining’ event, the intensity of
rain, the period of rain, the region of rainfall and the quantity of rain are
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6. Event Driven Supply Chains | September, 2009
all important attributes that define the event. So then, what is a complex
event? A complex event is a situation where two or more events occur in
different slices of time, and originate from different sources, but are logically
related to each other and impact each other in a manner that is not easily
comprehensible. An examination of an individual event in a complex event
may reveal little or not at all, but when seen in light of another event, makes
amazing business sense. Let’s us look at an example of a complex event that
we may comes across in our daily life. Consider this:
You are driving on a freeway and it starts to rain (Event 1)
You then notice a ‘Slippery When Wet’ road sign, look at the Speedometer,
and notice that your speed is 75 Mph (Event 2)
Just then you recollect the fact that the speed limit on this road is 60 Mph
– information captured from the event of you viewing the ‘speed limit’
signboard a few miles earlier (Event 3)
You reduce speed to 60 Mph to comply with the speed limit (Event 4)
You also remember the fact that the car’s tyres are quite worn out and
simple human procrastination prevented you from replacing them earlier
( Event 5)
As you take the turn into an exit, you suddenly feel the back tyres losing
grip and the car skidding towards the kerb (Event 6)
Fear immediately grips you as the car lurches uncontrollably towards the
kerb, and just as suddenly as it happened, you gain back control over the
car. How many times hasn’t this happened to all of us? Immediately, the
correlation of the sequence of events has resulted in fear that prompts you
to slow down to 40 Mph or lower. The events of the rain, bad tyres, speed
limits, and vehicle skidding, prompted an action from you to of slow
down far below the speed limit and drive more carefully (Action 1)
So the complex event consists of 6 events which are co-related in an intricate
manner, reveal important insights when viewed together in correlation, but
were individual events of not much significance when viewed in singular
terms. In a Supply Chain Management scenario, the application of Complex
Event Processing technology to operations and activities of the supply
chain, provides a similar type of business insight and operational visibility
into activities, through correlation of multiple events across time, across
systems, across participant’s enterprise systems, thus enabling the working
of a centralized, ‘One’ supply chain.
Some applications of CEP across industries:
Manufacturing: Procurement, distribution and for use-cases involving
lean operations and processes in manufacturing plants
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7. Event Driven Supply Chains | September, 2009
Logistics: Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI), dynamic re-scheduling in
distribution, Carrier performance monitoring and optimized tendering,
warehousing/ DC operations
Airlines and Airports: Allocation of gates and air/ land side resources
based on delays in flight arrival and departure timings
Hospitality: Monitoring demand based on website traffic rates and other
channels of enquiries
Finance: Fraud detection and stock market trading algorithms
THE SOLUTION: ADVANCED CONTROL TOWER
(ACT)
The Advanced Control Tower is a product agnostic framework based on the
Complex Event Processing (CEP) technology. It processes large volumes of
seemingly independent captured events occurring across multiple systems
in multiple slices of times, correlates and identifies patterns based on the
business rules and previous experience, and triggers alerts or initiates
processes in IT applications through actions, thus enhancing decision
making, value of information and response time. Value is delivered through
reducing the latency at each point in the decision making cycle.
Business Business Event
Event Data Latency
Data Captured
Data Latency
Insight Latency
Data Insight Delivery
Captured Decision Latency
Insight Latency
Decision Mode
Action Latency
Insight Action Taken
Delivery
Decision Latency
Decision
Value
Mode
Action Latency
Action
Value
Taken
Time Time
Action Time Action Time
Low Business Value & High Action Time High Business Value & Low Action Time
The ACT Framework is based on the following principles
The ability to capture information from different data-sources across the
supply chain operational landscape
Correlate and put together the jig-saw puzzle of data and information to
reveal a precise and accurate situational business picture
Respond to the current business situation using inputs from ACT and
make business critical decisions
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8. Event Driven Supply Chains | September, 2009
Execute the decisions with speed, accuracy and perfection
Value is maximized only when the above four aspects are synthesized with
minimal time latency. As information is captured, it has to be understood
and utilized. The delay in capturing, understanding and responding to an
activity or an incident is the challenge and the price that businesses pay in
our times.
Partner Networks Enterprise Applications Financial Transactions
Supply Chains Sensor Networks
Advanced Control Tower
Configurable Dashboards Configurable Dashboards
COMPONENTS OF ACT
Scenario: A process all inclusive of events, business rules and resulting
actions and alerts
Event: An occurrence of significance (operational or transactional)
Attributes: Elements of the event
Business Rules: The Logic that ties together the events and includes
policies, requirements, and conditional statements that are used to
determine the tactical actions that take place in applications and systems
Actions: The resulting processes or transactions that need to be triggered
within applications across the enterprise/supply chain or evoked from
personnel across the organization/supply chain
Alerts: Real-time ‘Notifications’ to management and operational
personnel regarding events and actions
Data is fed into the system in the form of ‘Events’ from across the supply
chain landscape -IT systems, transactions and physical movements on the
ground. These ‘Events’ are correlated using the business logic and upon
the occurrence of a pattern of events, an insight is revealed that in turn
provokes an action from a user (manually) or from a system (automatically).
A set of seemingly disparate events when occurring together may signify
something entirely different than from their individual occurrence. There
are two types of users who can utilize the framework - Operational Users
and Business Users.
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9. Event Driven Supply Chains | September, 2009
Operational users
Configure Events and the associated attributes to be captured
Configure business rules that vary with business need
Select Events to monitor, Business Rules to be applied, and Actions to
be executed
Configure alerts suitable for different levels of people and route them
appropriately using the chosen medium
Configure and view real-time dashboard elements providing insight into
real-time operational parameters
Business Users
Configure and select reports that provide situational visibility for the
multiple participants into the state of operations and transactions within
the supply chain
Automate the generation of reports periodically or upon the occurrence
of a pattern of events
Configure alerts and their severity levels and choose which ones to be
notified against
Respond to alerts by triggering or initiating actions
BENEFITS
Enhanced situational visibility into supply chain operations both at a
strategic level and at a tactical operational level
Faster and more accurate prediction of operational irregularities and
exceptional occurrences
Better utilization of information while it is still alive to deliver high
impact
Increased process automation for better customer satisfaction and
optimized business activities
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10. Contact Us:
HCL Technologies Ltd
330 Potrero Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94085
Tel: +1 408-733-0480
Email: ttl@hcl.com
Website: www.hcltech.com
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About HCL Technologies
HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company, working
with clients in the areas that impact and redefine the core of their
businesses. Since its inception into the global landscape after its IPO in
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& Utilities. HCL takes pride in its philosophy of ‘Employee First’ which
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