Use of SAAS in supply chain management

 Hello everyone,

I am Sreelakshmi V , second year MBA student from Amrita School of Business.In this blog I would like to share some insights on the use of software-as-a-service (SAAS) in supply chain management system.

Software-as-a-service is one of the main categories of cloud computing in which the applications are hosted and provided to the customers by third party over internet.Using SAAS in supply chain management will help in efficient and easy communication,production and operation activities.This will help the businesses as well as customers to access the services over the internet.Services can used as needed on pay per-use basis.

Using SAAS will help the businesses to avoid high fixed costs such as costs for continuous maintenance, upgrades and infrastructure related costs as it will be taken care of by the third party.Choosing this will have a good return on investment as profits will be high due to the increase in efficiency and costs will be low. SAAS system improves the collection and exchange of information and hence it could create efficient processes for transporting goods by offering low cost to integrate and scale shipments

Along with improving the operations efficiency,use of SAAS will also help in improving customer relations.The SAAS systems improves the efficiency of data collection and transfer of that data and this in turn helps to improve the responsiveness of businesses to the customer demand.

But SAAS providers have some disadvantages also.As the SAAS providers are catering many customers there will be a consumption of large amount of bandwidth in their data centers.This may cause outrages, down times or severe latency issues when trying to access the dashboard.The speed or availability decreases as the bandwidth decreases.Security is also an issue.The business is trusting the SAAS provider with the sensitive data regarding manufacturing methods, employee details or inventory management and it will be disastrous if it is in the wrong hands.And also, the business will have minimal or no control over the server as it is owned by a third party.