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Customer: Cargill
Application: LYNX - Global Grain Origination, Trading and Settlement System
Reference: Cover Story: Getting out the Grain
by Gary Hicks and Sherry Gabrielson
Distributed Computing Magazine, December 1998
by Bob Shafron; Distributed Object Computing Magazine, October 1997
Business: Cargill is an international marketer, processor, and distributor
of agricultural, food, financial and industrial products; it has some 79,000
employees in more than 1,000 locations in 72 countries, with business activities
in 100 more. The Cargill Worldwide Grain Trading Group (WGTG) is the primary
origination, marketing, and trading arm of Cargill in the Americas, Europe,
Africa and Asia for grain and oilseeds, crop inputs, and transportation. WGTG
operates more than 400 locations worldwide and has developed the LYNX
Project, a customized, mission-critical grain origination, trading, and
settlement system for its global operations.
The following is an example of a typical business case that is handled by the
system. A farmer wants to settle his account with Cargill for the truck of
grain that he has just brought into the grain elevator somewhere in the world.
The accounting clerk can adjust the prearranged contract price based on
overage/underage weight or quality of grain as the farmer waits, without having
to send a check next week from the headquarters. In addition, if this
settlement task is larger (a 50-car train unit, for example) the calculations
automatically revert from the local NT workstation to a remote high-end HP-UX
server, and processing is optimized for the business transaction.
Solution: The LYNX Distributed Processing Framework was developed which
provides for automatic load balancing and priority scheduling while processing
service requests. A "Service" may be requested from any of the thousands of
clients in the system. A "Service Trader" keeps track of Service Providers,
performs load balancing, processes requests and is key in problem resolution
and error recovery. A "Service Provider" is responsible for handling the
requests, and can dynamically be configured to process any type of request.
"Service Finders", "Service Schedulers" and "Task Schedulers" are all classes
of objects used to facilitate and optimize the distributed business transactions.
All communications between the classes of objects in the LYNX Distributed
Framework is done with PROMIA ORBs.
Statements: "The use of CORBA and the PROMIA ORBs has opened the doors
for interfacing the LYNX client and the LYNX Application Server, and provided
LYNX a smooth transition to a global application for Cargill Incorporated,
thereby adding corporate value and lowering ongoing global support costs."
--Gary Hicks, IT Manager LYNX Project
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