Case 7: Combining Business Intelligence with a Flexible Information System

Company Profile:

The LEGO Group is a family-owned company in Denmark, and best known for the manufacture of LEGO brand toys. In 2003 LEGO faced tough competition from imitators and manufacturers of electronic toys. In an effort to reduce cost and face competition, lego had to undergo a restructuring process. In 2006, the company announced to outsource the production plant to the electronics manufacturing service company, Flextronics Analysis of the supply chain resulted in reducing the cost of labor and to simplify production HR played a strategic role in hiring the best employees Adapting to these changes requires flexible and robust IT infrastructure with business capabilities that help the management perform better forecast and planning.

Explain the role of the database in SAP’s three-tier-system.

The database acts as a store for data and programs. It provides the organized storage of all the data in form of database tables, rows and other structures. For example tables that store Lego’s products, daily operations, supply chain etc.

SAP’s business suite is based on a flexible three tier client-server architecture that can easily be   adapted to the new Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) available in the latest versions of the software. In the first-tier, it is a client interface which is a browser-type graphical user interface (GUI) running on either a laptop, desktop, or mobile device. This software submits users’ requests to the application server. The second tier in the system is receiving and process clients’ requests. These application servers send the processed requests to the database system. Next, the third tier which consists of one or more relational databases. SAP’s business suite support database from different vendors, including those offered by Oracle, Microsoft, MySQL, and others.

Explain why distributed architectures are flexible.

Distributed architecture is flexible because it does not require any technical skill to obtain reports from the databases. It also enables authorized personnel to have direct access to the database system from the company’s various locations, including those in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Identify some of the business intelligence features included in SAP’s business software suite.

Business intelligence: tools for consolidating, analyzing, and providing access to large amounts of data to improve decision making. The business intelligence features included in SAP’s business software suite a SAP’s supply chain management (SCM), product life cycle (PLC), and Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) modules.

 SCM modules includes essential features such as supply chain monitoring and analysis as well as forecasting, planning, and inventory optimization.

 PLM modules enables managers to optimize development processes and system.

 ERP modules includes The Human Capital Management (HCM) applications for personal administration and development.

What are the main advantages and disadvantages of having multiple databases in a distributed architecture? Explain.

Advantages:

1) Reflect organizational structure:

Many organizations are naturally distributed over several location. For example, Flextronics has plants in Mexico, Hungary, and Czech Republic. It is natural for database used in such an application to be distributed over these locations.

2) Improved share ability and local autonomy

The geographical distribution of an organization can be reflected in the distribution of the data; users at one site can access data stored at other sites. Data can be placed at the site close to the users who normally use that data.

3) Improved availability

Distributed DBMSs are designed to continue to function despite such failures. If a single node fails, the system may be able to reroute the failed node's requests to another site.

4) Improved reliability

As data may be replicated so that it exists at more than one site, the failure of a node or a communication link does not necessarily make the data inaccessible.

5) Improved Performance

As the data is located near the site of 'greatest demand', and given the inherent parallelism of distributed DBMSs, speed of database access may be better than that achievable from a remote centralized database.

6) Economics

It is now generally accepted that it costs much less to create a system of smaller computers with the equivalent power of a single large computer. This makes it more cost effective for corporate divisions and departments to obtain separate computers. It is also much more cost-effective to add workstations· to a network than to update a mainframe system.

Modular growth

In a distributed environment, it is much easier to handle expansion. New sites can be added to the network without affecting the operations of other sites. This flexibility allows an organization to expand relatively easily.

Disadvantages of DDBMS

There are following disadvantages:

1) Complexity

A distributed DBMS that hides the distributed nature from the user and provides an acceptable level of performance, reliability, availability is inherently more complex then a centralized DBMS.

2) Cost
Increased complexity means that we can expect the procurement and maintenance costs for a DDBMS to be higher than those for a centralized DBMS. Furthermore, a distributed

3) Security 

In a centralized system, access to the data can be easily controlled. However, in a distributed DBMS not only does access to replicated data have to be controlled in multiple locations but also the network itself has to be made secure.

4) Integrity control more difficult 

Database integrity refers to the validity and consistency of stored data. Integrity is usually expressed in terms of constraints, which are consistency rules that the database is not permitted to violate. 

5) Lack of Standards 

Although distributed DBMSs depend on effective communication, we are only now starting to see the appearance of standard communication and data access protocols. 

6) Lack of experience 

General-purpose distributed DBMSs have not been widely accepted, although many of the protocols and problems are well understood.

 
7) Database design more complex 

Besides the normal difficulties of designing a centralized database, the design of a distributed database has to take account of fragmentation of data, allocation of fragmentation to specific sites, and data replication.