Impact of Technology on SCM: A Brief History of IT for SCM

Abstract

The 1986 Annual Report of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was setting an ambitious goal: “Our goal is to connect all parts of an organization—the office, the factory floor, the laboratory, the engineering department—from desktop to data center. We can connect everything within a building; we can connect a group of buildings on the same site or at remote sites; we can connect an entire organization around the world. We propose to connect a company from top to bottom with a single network that includes the shipping clerk, the secretary, the manager, the vice president, even the president.¹” More importantly, this goal was not based on some “vaporware” but on a concrete enabling technology, namely a new generation of super minicomputers based on a single computer architecture, VAX. From small desktop machines to computer clusters, VAX-based machines would be fully compatible, use a uniform operating system, and communicate across shared networks.