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Intel Supply-Chain Visualization
A hands-on tool for understanding, manipulating, and communicating a supply-chain system—to see if it works, and to view its effects on other parts of the business.

Who:

From Intel: Mary Murphy-Hoye, Director of IT Research
From the Media Lab: Prof. Hiroshi Ishii, James Patten, and the Tangible Media group
When:

2000-03
Where:

MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Why:

Supply chains are intangible and hard to describe.

The advent of the Internet allows more collaboration than ever before between individuals and companies, but the technology used to facilitate these collaborations can hinder rather than help the process.
How:
  • Intel decided to explore emerging technologies in order to put new tools into the hands of business experts. The new system is based on business policy—on the decisions and interactions that take place between companies.
  • The system was built using the "Sensetable" from the Tangible Media group.

Details

    Intel brought together three departments across MIT, as well as many departments within Intel.

    Murphy-Hoye wanted a model-based exploration and assessment system that would enrich business practices, and create a different kind of interaction between people and between companies.

    There are three components to this system:
    • The Process Handbook, created by the MIT System Dynamics Group, is a structured way of organizing process-based information. It provided a way to structure the business processes of supply-chain dynamics;
    • System Dynamics focuses on cause and effect. The collaborators created a periodic table of system dynamics for building valid models;
    • Tangible User Interface—the system used tangible objects to directly manipulate information and computation, which makes it easier to understand, manipulate, and communicate abstract models.

    The system allows the user to build supply-chain models from scratch, and makes "modeling at the speed of conversation" possible.

    The user can make sure that the connection between factories and supply houses makes sense, and that the supply-chain will work. The user also can change values, meanings, and inventory, to see if it will change the way the system performs.

 

 

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