The idea for developing Asprova SCM was originally conceived around 14 years ago.
In the autumn of 1996, I attended the APICS (American Production and Inventory Control Society) expo held in New Orleans.
The purpose of my visit was to see the offerings from our rivals in the production scheduler business.
Being successful in America should mean being the best in the world.
When I got there I was surprised to find many production schedulers singing the praises of “Global SCM”.
Before returning home I used my time at the expo to take in the ideas behind the SCM concept.
The concept was great – imagine how pleased our customers would be with the realization of such a system!
For a few months thereafter, I thought about how SCM software could practically be implemented.
I concluded that at the current time, a successful system could not be made.
In the first place, production schedulers were still not at a high level of completion.

In 2002 we released an updated version of Asprova APS, keeping in mind the long-term goal of SCM.

In 2006, I heard that MIT, the worlds top university for SCM study and teaching,
was offering a two week intensive course in Supply Chain Management.
In November of that year I attended the course and had much discussion with the worlds leading researchers on the topic,
and gathered many ideas on the leading edge of SCM ideas.

In 2008, the concept of cloud computing became popular and I consumed any reading material I could on the topic.
As a result, it became clear that the time for a successful SCM system had arrived
– with 64bit multicore CPUs, memory storage now in the tens of gigabytes, fast network connections making large distances mostly irrelevant,
and greatly improved stability and security, any company could now use the technologies needed for SCM at a low cost.
Development of Asprova SCM was started in October 2008.

The aims for the package were:

• [1] High speed and scalable
  -fast performance on hardware ranging from low-cost PCs through to large could systems.
• [2] Full featured and simple
  -containing enough functionality as standard to as to make further customization unnecessary,
  users should be able to implement the system on their own.
• [3]Low cost and short lead time
  -reduction of overall costs and time to implement the system.

Asprova SCM was released in June 2010.
By using cloud computing environments, this approach aims to dramatically reduce the cost of global SCM systems that previously would have required several hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement.

Asprova Corporation president, Kuniyoshi Takahashi