Assignment Questions On Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management is a complex process. There are several issues that can lead to the bullwhip effect and those issues can be exacerbated by delays in transmitting information, and a lack of coordination up and down the supply chain. Some causes of the bullwhip effect include:

7. Why can changes within a supply chain disrupt the normal flow of goods and services within a supply chain?

As supply chain is the connection which assists any organization in achieving its core business operations successful by rendering goods or services to its end customers or users. Supply chain of my organization has following nodes:

Success for many organizations depends on the firm’s ability to balance product and process changes while exceeding customer expectations for improved cost delivery and quality. In lieu of these issues firms have started to implement principles of supply chain management. Supply chain management mainly involves managing the flow of incoming materials, manufacturing operations, and downstream distribution has to be in alignment that is responsive to change in customer demands eliminating a surplus of inventory.

- Helps to identify opportunities in the market place. - Minimize the risk of doing business. - Uncovers and identifies potential problems. - Create benchmarks and helps track progress. - Evaluating the success of the business.

(Taken from “Managing Operations Across the Supply Chain” 2nd Edition, by Swink, Melnyk, Cooper, Hartley, Publisher McGraw-Hill, ISBN: 13: 978-1-12-180339-8)

5. Give an example of why it is important for different firms in the supply chain to coordinate logistics activities.

In a typical supply chain, raw materials are procured and items are produced at one

After about a month during which they make other changes like flagging of bottleneck parts, forming dedicated crews for heat treatment and the NCX-10, outsourcing some heat treatment jobs to outside vendors and making engineering changes to some parts, Alex and his team manage to ship a record number of customer orders. However they then perceive a new problem in which their bottlenecks have spread. Jonah steps in again at this point and shows them their erroneous policy of continuously releasing material just to keep the non-bottleneck machines busy all the time. This policy has caused an explosion of the work-in-process. To correct this situation, they work out how much of new material to release so that there is only about a few days of inventory in front of the bottlenecks even though this means that non-bottleneck machines would remain idle at times. Jonah assures them that this is perfectly acceptable and makes sense because ultimately only the bottleneck machine would define their plant throughput.

2. Handling purchase orders, receipt of purchased materials, storage of raw materials

The supplier should make sure that he keeps in touch on the progress of the production of the products and inform of any delays, extra costs, or failure that make take place.

1. What parts of the supply chain are most closely involved with the situation in this case? What is the responsibility of each part in order to maintain a smooth flow of material?

Supply chains represent the procurement, production and distribution activities of an organisation. Within a supply chain, these activities are viewed as linked and reliant on one another to produce the final outcome. It is believed that if one component of the chain fails, the whole chain is broken and product/service delivery goals will not be achieved.

Supply change management (SCM) is active in many organizations today. The purpose of SCM is to maximize the company value in order maintain a competitive advantage in the market place. As an Operational Managers (OM) it is essential to oversee the supply chain within an organization. The OM responsibility is to manage the supply chain flow, and to ensure the supply chain has a quality design in order to reduce cost and drive efficiency. (Reid & Sanders, 2010) An organization supply chain includes activities such as product development, sourcing, productions, logistics, material, and other information systems needed to coordinate the movement of goods from suppliers to manufactures, and to final customers.

According to (Hill and Hill, 2012), synchronising all supply chain activities through using the same data, and completing production at the scheduled time, coordinated between the manufacturer and suppliers,