The United States Air Force, in accordance with the Department of Defense's mission to modernize its processes, systems, and information flows, began an effort to replace legacy systems with two Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Nova Technology Solutions (NovaTech), an Information Technology (IT) and Analytics firm, recognized the Air Force's need for a repeatable, reliable, tool to aid decision making during the planning, installation, and sustainment of these ERP systems, thus proposing the use of modeling and simulation.
ExtendSim was used to create a simple simulation model to analyze the impact of ERP increased workload on network performance by simulating the flow of data packets, specifically at the Air Force Service Delivery Points (SDPs). Results showed a 15% increase in current workload (or current network traffic) will cause a 250% increase in end-user response time (Fitzgerald & Harper, 2008).
Further enhancements were made to the NovaTech model by Tiffany Jill Harper for a thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering at Wright State University. Her thesis showed a 98%, 209%, and 352% increase in response time when the current workload is increased by 10%, 20%, and 30%, respectively. In an experiment investigating the impact of capacity expansion in the model with the double resource SDP, it was determined that for a 30% increased workload a 42.5% increase in SDP bandwidth capacity at the base hosting the application server resulted in a 75% decrease in average end-user response time during the peak traffic hour.