Centralization vs Decentralization

Retail super-giant Wal-Mart has fought its way to becoming the world's largest company. Wal-Mart’s legendary supply chain technology has allowed them to break the three-day barrier that some economists in the eighties felt that it was unbreakable. In other words, Wal-Mart is often able to replenish items on the Wal-Mart shelf in less than three days – not from the central warehouse to the shelf, but from the manufacturer to the shelf. With quick and reliable 2-day turn around, Wal-Mart is able to maintain lower levels of inventory and still meet customer demand. These lower inventory levels result in either a reduced floor plan with lower carrying costs and lower interest expense – or a greater diversity of products on the store shelves.

Supply Chain Opportunity in an Uncertain Economic Recovery, by Eric G. Olson, discusses the advantages the supply chain has in a struggling economic recovery, when most other companies are dealing with uncertainty. The authors’ intention contained in this article is to discuss opportunities that businesses have to grow their operations despite coming out of a severe recession. The author identifies to take advantage of these opportunity, companies must be willing to be more flexible and that scalability is much easier to implement coming out of a severe recession. The author provides a design, methodology, and approach to implement these changes, highlighting the scalability and flexibility benefits, mitigation if multiple risks, identification supply chain opportunities.

Today’s global supply chain has been shaped by the past decades of focus and strategies based on achieving the lowest operational costs coupled with a push towards market expansion and supplier outsourcing. The expansion of global supply chains combined with the increasing number of joined connections to external business partners has significantly raised the possibility for supply chain disruptions (Poirier, Quinn, & Swink, 2010). In today’s global business environment, the importance of risk management continues to grow daily.

During the game, I realized that wide gaps in orders of every role in the supply chain such as factory, distributor and retailer create inventory management challenges. For example, distributor records 0units between week1-week 4 compared to retailer within the same period. The retailer records 3units, 5units, 2units and 2units between weeks 1- week 4. The same applies to factory with 0units from weeks 2-4. Addressing inventory management problems requires developing an average unit level to avoid disappointing customers when demand

Inventory segmentation represents a substantial challenge due to the hardy product selection requirements for Internet retailers. Determining the products that must be handle in one 's own distribution centers, versus wholesaler distribution centers and producers places has an impact on cost service structure of Internet retailers (Chiles & Dau, 2005).

In this final paper for Managerial Finance I will attempt to show how the supply chain inventory management method can be affected depending on the situation of the retailer. Studying the control method for problems in inventory, which would include both, excesses in inventory as well as shortages, and hoping to minimize loss.

The customers, wholesalers and retailers may order in large quantities with the expectation that they will receive a greater allocation of products that are in short supply. The impact on the supply chain is significant as the forecasted demand is greatly, and unrealistically, increased with these inflated orders. Eventually orders disappear and cancellations pour in, making it impossible for the manufacturer to determine the real demand for its products

Keeping accurate records of raw materials versus works’-in-progress helps a company realistically plan a sales strategy. For example, within the field of product development, there has been a “growing interest in hedging operational risk using financial instruments” to determine “risk aversion and multiperiod inventory” (Sun, Levi, Sim & Chen, 2007, p. 828). The outcome of inventory analysis can determine if a business model is high-profit or risk averse (Sun, Levi, Sim & Chen,

A Customized Textbook, Supply Chain Management SCHM2301, ISBN9781308037400 Copies are on reserve in the library

Schenck, J., McInerney, J. 1998. Applying vendor-managed inventory to the apparel industry. Automat. I.D. News 14(6) 36-38

Having no insight of how supply chain management works and using the Responsive E-beer Game simulation gave me a keen view on how the supply chains. Team members placed materials orders to their neighbors in an upstream response to demand from their downstream neighbors. The objective of the whole game was to reduce the cost of fulfilling demand. Cost was measured on backlogs and inventory. Retailer, wholesale, distributor, and manufacturer all play their roles in getting products out to customers. Playing several rounds with team mates made me realize that throughout the supply chain that everyone needed to be on the same page on how much product needed to be ordered through the different channels.

Calculating the benefits of vendor managed inventory in a manufacturer-retailer system (Bookbinder, Gumus, & Jewkes, 2010)

Effective retailing technology allows companies to manage inventory by efficiently storing, shipping, and stocking items that its customers want. Inventory management is the key to a company’s success or failure, and Kmart seems to be the poster child of poor supply chain management. Since as far back as Joseph Antonini’s leadership, Kmart has had logistics issues (Young, 2002). Another recent CEO, Chuck Conaway, went so far as to admit that supply chain management was “the Achilles Heel” of Kmart (Carr & Cone, 2001). This paper will examine how investing in redundancy, having an increase velocity in sensing and responding, and by building an adaptive supply chain community could have reduced the risk that is damaging to a supply chain.

“In this paper, we have summarized the existing contributions on the Newsvendor problem for managing inventories. Over and above synthesizing, summarizing, and extending the current contributions, we also find that there are several opportunities for future research.” (Quin and Wang, 2010) These are as follows:

Managing what's in a warehouse or on the shop floor can be extremely complex if you're looking for optimal cost and supply chain management capabilities( Needleman, 2017 ). Inventory estimation and control is directly impacted a company’s profitability.