Ebook Management Information Systems: Managing the digital firm (Thirteenth edition Global edition): Part 2

Ebook Management Information Systems: Managing the digital firm (Thirteenth edition Global edition): Part 2 presents the following content: Chapter 9: achieving operational excellence and customer intimacy: enterprise applications; chapter 10: ecommerce: digital markets, digital goods; chapter 11: managing knowledge; chapter 12: enhancing decision making; chapter 13: building information systems; chapter 14: managing projects; chapter 15:... 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Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re P A R T T H R E E Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Key System Applications for the Digital Age Chapter Chapter 11 Achieving Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy: Enterprise Applications Managing Knowledge Chapter 12 Enhancing Decision Making Chapter 10 E-Commerce: Digital Markets, Digital Goods Part Three examines the core information system applications businesses are using today to improve operational excellence and decision making These applications include enterprise systems; systems for supply chain management, customer relationship management, and knowledge management; e-commerce applications; and business-intelligence systems This part answers questions such as: How can enterprise applications improve business performance? How firms use e-commerce to extend the reach of their businesses? How can systems improve decision making and help companies make better use of their knowledge assets? Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Chapter Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Achieving Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy: Enterprise Applications LEARNING OBJECTIVES CHAPTER OUTLINE After reading this chapter, you will be able to answer the following questions: 9.1 ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS What Are Enterprise Systems? Enterprise Software Business Value of Enterprise Systems 9.2 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS The Supply Chain Information Systems and Supply Chain Management Supply Chain Management Software Global Supply Chains and the Internet Business Value of Supply Chain Management Systems 9.3 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS What Is Customer Relationship Management? Customer Relationship Management Software Operational and Analytical CRM Business Value of Customer Relationship Management Systems 9.4 ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS: NEW OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES Enterprise Application Challenges Next-Generation Enterprise Applications How enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence? How supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers? How customer relationship management systems help firms achieve customer intimacy? What are the challenges posed by enterprise applications? How are enterprise applications taking advantage of new technologies? Interactive Sessions: DP World Takes Port Management To The Next Level with RFID Customer Relationship Management Heads to the Cloud LEARNING TRACK MODULES SAP Business Process Map Business Processes in Supply Chain Management and Supply Chain Metrics Best-Practice Business Processes in CRM Software Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know TECHNOLOGY HELPS NVIDIA ANTICIPATE THE FUTURE just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, I these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw n 1999, NVIDIA made history when it invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) Today, Nvidia’s chips can be found in a broad range of products, including video game consoles, smartphones, tablets, auto infotainment systems, and supercomputers Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, the company has 7,000 employees across 20 countries, and earned $3.5 billion in revenue in 2011 Because so many Nvidia chips are made for the consumer electronics industry, one of the company’s toughest challenges is to accurately forecast customer demand and to adjust its inventory levels accordingly Consumer trends can be fickle and subject to sudden shifts one way or the other If, for example, the demand for a video game console drops unexpectedly, Nvidia might be stuck with thousands of excess chips for those systems, which represents a significant loss for the company Nvidia's chips are created long before they are sold to customers, requiring production planners to make estimates of how much material the company will need and how much production time to schedule at Nvidia’s foundries, which are located primarily in Asia When Nvidia’s customers estimated how many Nvidia chips they would need, Nvidia’s planners made their own independent estimates Using these estimates, Nvidia would buy enough material (primarily silicon wafers) in advance and schedule enough capacity at the company’s foundries (which are primarily in Asia) to meet what it thought would be the right level of demand Business units would meet with Nvidia’s finance unit to discuss the number of chips to be produced, based on high-level estimates Nvidia’s chip operations group, which was responsible for the actual production, never received the forecasts and could only see existing inventory Nvidia’s production department used spreadsheets to create rough inventory forecasts, but those spreadsheets did not allow planners to drill down, sort data by product, compare different types of inventory, or view data by business segment, and the data for these spreadsheets had to be gathered from a number of systems Management received a wake-up call when Nvidia switched its old manufacturing process to a 40 nanometer process The company was forced to carry inventory created by the old manufacturing process as well as for customers who were not ready to change Management discovered that the current system lacked the ability to handle the complexity of two separate sets of inventory and was unable to balance supply and demand for its new products and its existing products, as well as predict how long it would take for its customers to transition to the 40 nanometer method Nvidia wound up with way too much inventory, and when it started cutting back, its suppliers were caught off guard To address these problems, Nvidia set up a supply chain steering committee to review its supply chain processes The steering committee recommended that Nvidia replace its spreadsheet-based inventory forecasting system with something more current SAP software proved to be the logical choice Most of Nvidia's data were already located within buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to © JohnKwan / Shutterstock 367 Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily 368 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua its SAP advanced planning and optimization (APO) system Nvidia built a customized interface on top of its APO system for its new inventory forecasting solution using SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence is a tool for analyzing business data and creating ad hoc reports, with access to company data via an easy-to-use Web-based interface Another part of the solution was to use SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to create state-of-the-art supply and demand dashboards where executives could easily access high-level inventory data Using these dashboards, Nvidia executives are able to drill down into details at the product level and to perform forward- and backward-looking calculations, with or without inventory reserves The information is presented in user-friendly charts and tables These solutions allow Nvidia to forecast inventory levels for the next four quarters based on anticipated demand, as well as to view six months’ worth of current inventory The error rate has been reduced to percent or less compared to a percent error rate in the company’s old spreadsheet-based forecasts With a $500 million tied up in inventory, the company saves $25 million by being able to reduce its forecasting errors Not only has the new system improved accuracy, the dashboards have also helped to reduce the amount of time required for Nvidia executives and planners to build and approve a forecast The old manual system required 140 hours to prepare a quarterly forecast; the new system has reduced that to only 30 hours Best of all, all of Nvidia's inventory data are located centrally and are accessible to all of the company's different business divisions Nvidia now has a consistent method of forecasting, instead of multiple models, and managers clearly are able to make better decisions that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Sources: David Hannon, “Inventory Forecasting at Nvidia,” SAP InsiderPROFILES, April–June 2012; www.nvidia.com, accessed July 20, 2012; andwww.mysap.com, accessed July 20, 2012 N vidia’s problems with inventory forecasting illustrate the critical role of supply chain management systems in business Nvidia’s business performance was impeded because it could not balance supply and demand for its products Costs were unnecessarily high because the company was unable to accurately determine the exact amount of each of its chips needed to fulfill orders and hold just that amount in inventory Production plans were based on “best guesses.” Sometimes this left the company holding too much inventory it couldn’t sell or not enough to fulfill customer orders The chapter-opening diagram calls attention to important points raised by this case and this chapter Nvidia supplies the consumer electronics industry, where customer tastes change rapidly and demand is very volatile The company has a fairly long production lead time required to fulfill orders Nvidia used a spreadsheet-based planning system that was heavily manual and unable to forecast precisely Nvidia’s management realized it needed better forecasting tools and appointed a supply chain steering committee to recommend a solution The company was able to create a much more accurate inventory forecasting system by using SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and BusinessObjects Dashboards to analyze data that had already been captured in its SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO) system These tools have made it much easier for Nvidia’s management to access and analyze production data for forecasting and inventory planning, greatly improving both decision making and operational efficiency Here are some questions to think about: How did Nvidia’s inability to forecast demand affect its suppliers and customers? How is Nvidia’s business affected by having a global supply chain? Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily Chapter Achieving Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy: Enterprise Applications 369 in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to 9.1 ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS A round the globe, companies are increasingly becoming more connected, both internally and with other companies If you run a business, you’ll want to be able to react instantaneously when a customer places a large order or when a shipment from a supplier is delayed You may also want to know the impact of these events on every part of the business and how the business is performing at any point in time, especially if you’re running a large company Enterprise systems provide the integration to make this possible Let’s look at how they work and what they can for the firm WHAT ARE ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS? Imagine that you had to run a business based on information from tens or even hundreds of different databases and systems, none of which could speak to one another? Imagine your company had 10 different major product lines, each produced in separate factories, and each with separate and incompatible sets of systems controlling production, warehousing, and distribution At the very least, your decision making would often be based on manual hardcopy reports, often out of date, and it would be difficult to really understand what is happening in the business as a whole Sales personnel might not be able to tell at the time they place an order whether the ordered items are in inventory, and manufacturing could not easily use sales data to plan for new production You now have a good idea of why firms need a special enterprise system to integrate information Chapter introduced enterprise systems, also known as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which are based on a suite of integrated software modules and a common central database The database collects data from many different divisions and departments in a firm, and from a large number of key business processes in manufacturing and production, finance and accounting, sales and marketing, and human resources, making the data available for applications that support nearly all of an organization’s internal business Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily 370 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in FIGURE 9.1 HOW ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS WORK volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Enterprise systems feature a set of integrated software modules and a central database that enables data to be shared by many different business processes and functional areas throughout the enterprise activities When new information is entered by one process, the information is made immediately available to other business processes (see Figure 9.1) If a sales representative places an order for tire rims, for example, the system verifies the customer’s credit limit, schedules the shipment, identifies the best shipping route, and reserves the necessary items from inventory If inventory stock were insufficient to fill the order, the system schedules the manufacture of more rims, ordering the needed materials and components from suppliers Sales and production forecasts are immediately updated General ledger and corporate cash levels are automatically updated with the revenue and cost information from the order Users could tap into the system and find out where that particular order was at any minute Management could obtain information at any point in time about how the business was operating The system could also generate enterprise-wide data for management analyses of product cost and profitability ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE Enterprise software is built around thousands of predefined business processes that reflect best practices Table 9.1 describes some of the major business processes supported by enterprise software Companies implementing this software would have to first select the functions of the system they wished to use and then map their business processes to the predefined business processes in the software (One of our Learning Tracks shows how SAP enterprise software handles the procurement process for a new piece of equipment.) A firm would use configuration tables provided by the software manufacturer to tailor a particular aspect of Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily Chapter Achieving Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy: Enterprise Applications 371 in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua TABLE 9.1 BUSINESS PROCESSES SUPPORTED BY ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know Financial and accounting processes, including general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, fixed assets, cash management and forecasting, product-cost accounting, cost-center accounting, asset accounting, tax accounting, credit management, and financial reporting just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw Human resources processes, including personnel administration, time accounting, payroll, personnel planning and development, benefits accounting, applicant tracking, time management, compensation, workforce planning, performance management, and travel expense reporting buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to Manufacturing and production processes, including procurement, inventory management, purchasing, shipping, production planning, production scheduling, material requirements planning, quality control, distribution, transportation execution, and plant and equipment maintenance Sales and marketing processes, including order processing, quotations, contracts, product configuration, pricing, billing, credit checking, incentive and commission management, and sales planning the system to the way it does business For example, the firm could use these tables to select whether it wants to track revenue by product line, geographical unit, or distribution channel If the enterprise software does not support the way the organization does business, companies can rewrite some of the software to support the way their business processes work However, enterprise software is unusually complex, and extensive customization may degrade system performance, compromising the information and process integration that are the main benefits of the system If companies want to reap the maximum benefits from enterprise software, they must change the way they work to conform to the business processes defined by the software To implement a new enterprise system, Tasty Baking Company identified its existing business processes and then translated them into the business processes built into the SAP ERP software it had selected To ensure it obtained the maximum benefits from the enterprise software, Tasty Baking Company deliberately planned for customizing less than percent of the system and made very few changes to the SAP software itself It used as many tools and features that were already built into the SAP software as it could SAP has more than 3,000 configuration tables for its enterprise software Leading enterprise software vendors include SAP, Oracle, IBM, Infor Global Solutions, and Microsoft There are versions of enterprise software packages designed for small and medium-sized businesses and on-demand versions, including software services running in the cloud (see Section 9.4) BUSINESS VALUE OF ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS Enterprise systems provide value both by increasing operational efficiency and by providing firmwide information to help managers make better decisions Large companies with many operating units in different locations have used enterprise systems to enforce standard practices and data so that everyone does business the same way worldwide Coca-Cola, for instance, implemented a SAP enterprise system to standardize and coordinate important business processes in 200 countries Lack of standard, company-wide business processes prevented the company from leveraging its worldwide buying power to obtain lower prices for raw materials and from reacting rapidly to market changes Enterprise systems help firms respond rapidly to customer requests for information or products Because the system integrates order, manufacturing, and delivery data, manufacturing is better informed about producing only what Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily 372 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua customers have ordered, procuring exactly the right amount of components or raw materials to fill actual orders, staging production, and minimizing the time that components or finished products are in inventory Alcoa, the world’s leading producer of aluminum and aluminum products with operations spanning 31 countries and over 200 locations, had initially been organized around lines of business, each of which had its own set of information systems Many of these systems were redundant and inefficient Alcoa’s costs for executing requisition-to-pay and financial processes were much higher and its cycle times were longer than those of other companies in its industry (Cycle time refers to the total elapsed time from the beginning to the end of a process.) The company could not operate as a single worldwide entity After implementing enterprise software from Oracle, Alcoa eliminated many redundant processes and systems The enterprise system helped Alcoa reduce requisition-to-pay cycle time by verifying receipt of goods and automatically generating receipts for payment Alcoa’s accounts payable transaction processing dropped 89 percent Alcoa was able to centralize financial and procurement activities, which helped the company reduce nearly 20 percent of its worldwide costs Enterprise systems provide much valuable information for improving management decision making Corporate headquarters has access to up-tothe-minute data on sales, inventory, and production, and uses this information to create more accurate sales and production forecasts Enterprise software includes analytical tools for using data captured by the system to evaluate overall organizational performance Enterprise system data have common standardized definitions and formats that are accepted by the entire organization Performance figures mean the same thing across the company Enterprise systems allow senior management to easily find out at any moment how a particular organizational unit is performing, determine which products are most or least profitable, and calculate costs for the company as a whole For example, Alcoa’s enterprise system includes functionality for global human resources management that shows correlations between investment in employee training and quality, measures the company-wide costs of delivering services to employees, and measures the effectiveness of employee recruitment, compensation, and training that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to 9.2 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS If you manage a small firm that makes a few products or sells a few services, chances are you will have a small number of suppliers You could coordinate your supplier orders and deliveries using a telephone and fax machine But if you manage a firm that produces more complex products and services, then you will have hundreds of suppliers, and your suppliers will each have their own set of suppliers Suddenly, you are in a situation where you will need to coordinate the activities of hundreds or even thousands of other firms in order to produce your products and services Supply chain management (SCM) systems, which we introduced in Chapter 2, are an answer to the problems of supply chain complexity and scale THE SUPPLY CHAIN A firm’s supply chain is a network of organizations and business processes for procuring raw materials, transforming these materials into intermediate and Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily Chapter Achieving Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy: Enterprise Applications 373 in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua finished products, and distributing the finished products to customers It links suppliers, manufacturing plants, distribution centers, retail outlets, and customers to supply goods and services from source through consumption Materials, information, and payments flow through the supply chain in both directions Goods start out as raw materials and, as they move through the supply chain, are transformed into intermediate products (also referred to as components or parts), and finally, into finished products The finished products are shipped to distribution centers and from there to retailers and customers Returned items flow in the reverse direction from the buyer back to the seller Let’s look at the supply chain for Nike sneakers as an example Nike designs, markets, and sells sneakers, socks, athletic clothing, and accessories throughout the world Its primary suppliers are contract manufacturers with factories in China, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, and other countries These companies fashion Nike’s finished products Nike’s contract suppliers not manufacture sneakers from scratch They obtain components for the sneakers—the laces, eyelets, uppers, and soles—from other suppliers and then assemble them into finished sneakers These suppliers in turn have their own suppliers For example, the suppliers of soles have suppliers for synthetic rubber, suppliers for chemicals used to melt the rubber for molding, and suppliers for the molds into which to pour the rubber Suppliers of laces have suppliers for their thread, for dyes, and for the plastic lace tips Figure 9.2 provides a simplified illustration of Nike’s supply chain for sneakers; it shows the flow of information and materials among suppliers, Nike, Nike’s distributors, retailers, and customers Nike’s contract manufacturers are that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to FIGURE 9.2 NIKE’S SUPPLY CHAIN This figure illustrates the major entities in Nike’s supply chain and the flow of information upstream and downstream to coordinate the activities involved in buying, making, and moving a product Shown here is a simplified supply chain, with the upstream portion focusing only on the suppliers for sneakers and sneaker soles Chapter I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that In consequence I’m in- clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men Most of the con- fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa- The Great Gatsby ther snobbish snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect- ed scorn If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away This responsiveness had nothing to with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily 374 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations The Car- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car- ries on today I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi- gration known as the Great War I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- es’ with very grave, hesitant faces Father agreed to finance me for a year and after vario perma- nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug- gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went The Great Gatsby out to the country alone I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut- tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road ‘How you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless- ly I told him And as I walked on I was lonely no longer I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler He had casu- ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv- in volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae- cenas knew And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri- ca It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetua its primary suppliers The suppliers of soles, eyelets, uppers, and laces are the secondary (Tier 2) suppliers Suppliers to these suppliers are the tertiary (Tier 3) suppliers The upstream portion of the supply chain includes the company’s suppliers, the suppliers’ suppliers, and the processes for managing relationships with them The downstream portion consists of the organizations and processes for distributing and delivering products to the final customers Companies doing manufacturing, such as Nike’s contract suppliers of sneakers, also manage their own internal supply chain processes for transforming materials, components, and services furnished by their suppliers into finished products or intermediate products (components or parts) for their customers and for managing materials and inventory The supply chain illustrated in Figure 9.2 has been simplified It only shows two contract manufacturers for sneakers and only the upstream supply chain for sneaker soles Nike has hundreds of contract manufacturers turning out finished sneakers, socks, and athletic clothing, each with its own set of suppliers The upstream portion of Nike’s supply chain would actually comprise thousands of entities Nike also has numerous distributors and many thousands of retail stores where its shoes are sold, so the downstream portion of its supply chain is also large and complex that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi- zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi- tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden It was Gatsby’s mansion Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle- man of that name My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a The Great Gatsby view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d know just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli- max His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest It was hard to real- ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to that Why they came east I don’t know They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek- ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce- ly knew at all Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful re Colonial man- sion overlooking the bay The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final- ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch He had changed since his New Haven years Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat It was a body capable of enor- mous leverage—a cruel body His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im- pression of fractiousness he conveyed There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts ‘Now, these matters is final,’ 10 The Great Gatsby he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch ‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub- nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore ‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy- colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak- ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which tw buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house I must have stood for a few moments listening to INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT Inefficiencies in the supply chain, such as parts shortages, underutilized plant capacity, excessive finished goods inventory, or high transportation costs, are caused by inaccurate or untimely information For example, manufacturers may keep too many parts in inventory because they not know exactly when they will receive their next shipments from their suppliers Suppliers may order too few raw materials because they not have precise information on demand These supply chain inefficiencies waste as much as 25 percent of a company’s operating costs If a manufacturer had perfect information about exactly how many units of product customers wanted, when they wanted them, and when they could be produced, it would be possible to implement a highly efficient just-in-time strategy Components would arrive exactly at the moment they were needed and finished goods would be shipped as they left the assembly line In a supply chain, however, uncertainties arise because many events cannot be foreseen—uncertain product demand, late shipments from suppliers, defective parts or raw materials, or production process breakdowns To satisfy customers, manufacturers often deal with such uncertainties and unforeseen events by keeping more material or products in inventory than what they think they may actually need The safety stock acts as a buffer for the lack of flexibility in the supply chain Although excess inventory is expensive, low fill rates are also costly because business may be lost from canceled orders One recurring problem in supply chain management is the bullwhip effect, in which information about the demand for a product gets distorted as it passes from one entity to the next across the supply chain A slight rise in demand for an item might cause different members in the supply chain—distributors, manufacturers, suppliers, secondary suppliers (suppliers’ suppliers), and tertiary suppliers (suppliers’ suppliers’ suppliers)—to stockpile inventory so each