Apple Supply Chain

The main elements of a supply chain include purchasing, operations, distribution, and integration. The supply chain begins with purchasing. Purchasing managers or buyers are typically responsible for determining which products their company will sell, sourcing product suppliers and vendors, and procuring products from vendors at prices and terms that meets profitability goals.

Apple Inc. commonly known as Apple has effectively managed to be a successful company in a very competitive consumer electronics industry by been innovative and differentiating the company’s products with similar products in the markets by offering high quality products and good customer service while the actual manufacturing of the products is outsourced to trusted third party suppliers. On a wider perspective, the company has set high standards that even the company itself has to be on its level best to maintain the standards that it has set. Over the last few years, the consumer electronics market has

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distribution of a commodity. These processes flows downstream toward a customer, and upstream toward the first supplier. Therefore, this process is very important in today's world. For example, a Big Mac is a sandwich that is very popular from McDonalds. Not many know that this product the suppliers provide McDonalds with this substance. It starts with beef, vegetables, and bread companies. Factories and warehouses send these products, and McDonalds makes this product to serve to the customers. Gasoline supply chains starts with finding geographical places to retrieve the gasoline. Then, the production begins with drilling in that particular area. Next, the refining process takes place by marketing the oil. Lastly, gasoline is sold to customers at gas stations. With an automobile repair, the supply chain starts with the customer's needs for service. The parts needed for the car can sometimes be at the repair facility, or may have to be ordered from a factory. Once those parts are shipped to the facility, services begin to take place. The service is then sold to the customer. With a textbook, the supply chain starts with content of the book's needs. Therefore, companies who provides paper and ink would be an ideal start of the supply chain. Next, the content of the text book comes from different writers, or school faculty. The books are made at factories, and then shipped to the warehouse. Next, the warehouse ships these books to businesses or schools for retail. Lastly, these books are sold to customers for purchase.

Globalization has also had a significant impact on Apple's supply chain. The company earns high profits because it is able to produce its products at a low price and then sell them at a high price (Chakrabotty, 2012). In addition, the company has noted that it assembles its products in China because all of the components are made there this in addition to the low cost of assembly labor. Apple facilitates this by working with logistics suppliers like FedEx who can quickly move finished goods around the world via a number of hubs. All of Apple's products, for example, arrived in the United States in Oakland, California and from there make their way to the customer.

Apple Inc. is one of the largest technology companies in the world. The company develops consumer electronic gadgets such as smartphones, computers, desktops, laptops, iPods and tablets. The company was formed in 1976 by Steve Jobs with an intention of making computers but later it changed its focus to include the manufacturing of consumer electronics. However, the company was dealt a big blow when its chief executive officer and founder Steve Jobs died. The company will therefore have to search for ways in which it will maintain its market dominance as well as capture new and emerging markets. This research therefore seeks to establish how Apple forecasts demand and manages its inventory (Apple Computer Inc., 2006).

Apple's entire supply chain has been rated as the top supply chain in the world by Gartner's (Wailgum, 2011). Apple was one of the top companies rated in the resilience category by overcoming such hurdles as the Japanese earthquake without any major disruptions. Other categories that the supply chains were critiqued under included speed, agility, efficiency, responsiveness, and innovation. Apple's entire production operation is outsourced to the Asian Pacific and the company manufactures their goods through strategic partners who are some of the best electronics manufactures in the world.

When Tim Cook was appointed to be in charge with Apple’s supply chain, Apple became one of the leading companies. In 2012, Apple was said to turn inventory every 5 days and that was part of the reason the research firm, Gartner,

Apple’s success can be attributed to Steve Jobs leadership skills. He made corporate culture an important part of its success. They employ highly skilled employees who strive to do things “the rights way” (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014). All these things are true only in the corporate sector of Apple. When it comes to the manufacturing process, Apple’s product components are manufactured in other countries and they have faced scrutiny for this process. Despite every effort to audit these factories to ensure compliance, they still do not comply and fail to meet Apple’s standards.

Our approach was to facilitate the demand with respect to the market. We penetrated the market by building factory in Fardo and building warehouses to the respective regions, Caleopeia, Sorange, Entworpe, Tyran. Another component that we had to consider was finding the optimal cost to increase market share and increase our profit margin. Discussion on the logistics will be discussed thoroughly, which affected our decision points and our overall outcome. There are a few questions we needed to answer before we built a road map to our strategy i.e. figuring out where to build the factory and warehouse, estimate the demand of the four regions and Fargo region, should we change capacity, adjust ordering point with respect to quantity, and also

Richard Dana Associates (RDA) was brought in by the owners of a family-owned business with complex relationship issues at a time preceding an anticipated leadership transition. Following individual and group coaching sessions, RDA was able to help the leadership separate personal issues, and codify practices through formal policies to allow the leadership group to focus on business issues without personal complications. At the end of RDA's engagement, the client was well-positioned to begin developing a transition plan.

Apple’s management had predicted its margins to be shrieked for the next 5 years; as a cause of that recession that reshaped the market. The management took a fast and smart decision and they predict the market after they analyzed it and found out that they can make better future by using the low prices of the parts, rather than downsizing.

Apple’s renowned for their brilliant abiltity to cope with changes in market demand. They strictly control every aspect of the supply chain to ensure that both the distribution and supply-and-demand relationship are near perfect. They use a Make-To-Stock method of Supply Chain Management that allows customers to walk into any Apple Store and make a purchase the same day, which is coupled with an extremely low inventory level that means the system has nearly Make-To-Order characteristics. Apple uses SAP (Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing), a German Enterprise Resource Planning software, to power the global supply chain and implement a strategy to “purchase raw material and reserve manufacturing capacity ahead of time “ [1] in order to make this possible.

• Knowing it could not be the best at making chips, boxes, monitors, cables, keyboards, and the like for its explosively successful Apple II, Apple Computer outsourced 70 percent of its manufacturing costs and components. Instead of building internal bureaucracies where it had no unique skills, Apple outsourced critical items like design (to Frogdesign), printers (to Tokyo Electric), and even key elements of marketing (to Regis McKenna, which achieved a “$100 million image” for Apple when it had only a few employees and about $1 million to spend).

Apple’s supply chain management process is one of the most popular and interesting process. Apple’s continuous strive to be a leading edge technological company in the market gives them the upper-hand to its suppliers. An article written by Eva Dou and Lorraine Luk on WSJ Digits on November 20, 2014 explains the power Apple has on its suppliers and some detrimental effects the power has left on the supplier. At Apple, they have a strict process on how they release a product and the advertisements that are put out in order to get stakeholders attention. Each step is crucial to Apple’s continuous success, these steps consist of; research and development, concept testing, pre-launch, official launch, and the quarterly review. As for Apple’s supply chain management, the logistics, and all the production processes is what has kept Apple at the top of the technological market.