MCOR links for business
15 Jan 2000
Plant-to-boardroom IT is the goal, but what happens to the information when it gets to the top, asks Mike Spear? Busy chief executives want answers at the touch of a button, which is almost what a new business software package can now offer. Invented originally by Russian computer scientists and then developed at MIT, the COR Enterprise Optimizer is now being rolled out to industry by Edinburgh-based MCOR Products and Services.
According to MCOR's director and general manager Colin Kidd, the software `can typically increase a company's bottom line by up to 2-8 per cent of sales values'. The Windows 98/NT-based product looks deceptively simple: a palette of intelligent graphic objects, representing typical business functions, that can be clicked and dragged onto screen to build up a diagram of a business process, a company operation, or an entire enterprise, as in the illustration for a UK power distributor.
Underneath those objects, however, lies the intelligent heart of the optimiser. Each object stores operational and financial data in tables that, when filled in, complete the business model. This model is then used in real-time to look at what-if scenarios, solve problems - and maximise profits. Built into each graphical object are the rules that define the business functions and their inter-relationships. Using a procedure based on mixed integer linear programming, COR automatically generates all the mathematical equations and programming needed for the optimisation process. All the user needs is a good understanding of the business being modelled.
The basic Enterprise Optimizer package costs around £5000 but the whole system is customisable to suit the application. It has already been tested in the UK by the likes of ICI and BOC, who have used the package to optimise product sourcing and supply of its industrial gases.
Kidd describes COR as `a generic process tool. Almost every activity can be defined as a "process" and that process can be optimised with MCOR.' To prove the point, the latest large-scale application for COR is in New Zealand where the country's £8billion dairy exporting business used it to implement a nationwide supply chain solution in just five weeks.
Other recent applications include one of Brazil's largest sugar processors who generated savings of $10million/year by using COR in a strategic review of its resource allocation.
