D7.5 Supply Chain Management pilot – final prototype, has been delivered

This document summarizes activities performed in the Supply Chain Management Pilot according to the Pilots Integration Plan by making use of the technical results and milestones of MIDAS platform and aligned to the Platform Integration Plan activities.
The main purpose is to give a feedback regarding the usage of the MIDAS platform in testing Logistics GS1 LIM compliant service arquitecture and evaluating the main success factors and key performance indicators from the users’ point of view. According to the proposed business value of MIDAS, the pilot has confirmed the initial hypothesis with the following remarks:

  • Reduction of overall R&D and maintenance cost, compared to Model-Based Testing Approaches (MBTA) and to Traditional Testing Approaches (TTA).
    • Compared to TTA, the reduction is achieved in a med-term (not short term), when regression tests are included in the maintenance costs (10% – 40%)
    • The cloud infrastructure reduces the barrier for additional costs in hardware elements. But the test-bed environment is a great cost for SMEs. Adding to MIDAS cloud the service to deploy the systems to be tested would reduce the costs and improve the adoption for SMEs.
    • MIDAS model tools should be improved to become a commercial tool (in particular the absence of tools for XML modeling is a great barrier). MIDAS licensing costs are required as an evaluation criteria for SMEs. A SaaS model and a pay-per-bug are models valid for companies.
  • Improvement of Quality of SUT (number of bugs/errors/defects detected in development phase vs maintenance phase), compared to MBTA and TTA.
    • Compared to TTA, the quality is improved in terms of bugs detected in development phase (> 15 bugs in a very simplified SCM).
    • The main barrier for adding new actors in a supply chain is the high risk to integrate their services in a working supply chain management system. The quality of the SUT in terms of reduction of integration problems (less risk and less time-to-market) is achieved compared to TTA.

The document contains quantitative and qualitative results and other insights derived from the Logistics pilot experience: i) 25% of companies would pay for MBT; ii) GS1 LIM should be certifiable and, iii) SMEs identify as a major barrier the formula to calculate the ROI (when the effort and costs for learning and modeling become an investment).