Customer Service Manager All Talk About The Operation Plans

3. Assuming that processing starts at 7 am on a “busy” day, present the situation during such a day, by constructing an inventory build-up diagram for bins and trucks.

The retailers had to estimate their customers’ demands well in advance of the selling season and place bulk orders for each season’s inventory. This involved high risk for the retailers as over-estimation would lead to unsold stock; whereas under-estimation led to stock outs and loss of potential sales.

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.

When the trucks arrive a small team unloads and bring product to their designated section of the store. For apparel, the clothing is put on racks and wheeled out. Where a small team folds, locates and displays them according to planograms and sets. The process of unloading, locating, displaying should be concluded before the store opens with no products on the sales floor. This is to keep the store looking clean and providing the customers with a clean, stocked environment. The effectiveness of Targets current distribution is good; however, inventory counts often have a crippling effect on the company. Since target launched their online pickup and ship from store the company has noticed an error in their operations. Their inventory counts did not refresh fast enough, if a guest just bought say a dress, it would not be accounted for, for 3-5 hours later in the system. Thus, issues for customer satisfaction would occur when a guest would either see online that we had it in stock, or order it for in store pick up and us not being able to fulfill their order. By improving their inventory management system, Target could see an increase in sales, customer satisfaction and online and in store customer traffic.

(i.e. products that they get to order only once because of long supplier lead times). First they determine a forecast for an item and then they have a process for converting that forecast into an order quantity.

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

Office Depot uses multiple inventory strategies to order products. 90% to 95% of goods are ordered through automatic replenishment, manual replenishment, pull replenishment, and global sourcing are also used depending on channel, volume, velocity and cost. (Office Depot, 2015). The accuracy of the inventory from both a DC and store perspective is critical to the organizations success. Heizer and Render (2014) state that record accuracy is a prerequisite to inventory management, production scheduling, and sales. Accuracy is maintained by either periodic or perpetual systems (p.479). In Office Depot, the stores are required to cycle-count technology items such as laptops, desktops computers, and tablets five days a week. Discrepancies are entered in the system and bounced off the local DC’s on-hand inventory discrepancies. Office Depot is a “blind receive” organization meaning the stores receive pallets of products and simply unwrap and put them away. The only way a store knows if a product is missing is through the cycle-count program. This system was put into place to speed up the receiving process and eliminate unnecessary steps once the product was received at the store level. Office Depot conducts a full physical inventory once a year through a third party and trues up the inventory shrink at this time.

The culture of the company is built on customer service, team building and a fun environment. The focus on the customer includes helping the customer with suggestions to create the perfect event, from birthday parties to retirement celebrations by covering the ‘parts of the party’. That ideal consists of starting with color schemes or theme, then covering the tableware, decorations, favors, invitations, thank you cards, and banners to have all of the must haves covered. That same concept goes for Halloween, which is the biggest season for Party City. We encourage the customer to not just buy a costume but become the character by starting with what the customer wants to be then offering accessories that complement the costume to create the look from head to toe. We are encouraged to greet every customer that walks in and offer assistance throughout their shopping experience. We are also careful to keep the lines moving to ensure an efficient checkout. During the holidays and major sporting events, the company encourages the employees to dress the part. For Halloween, we dress up in full costumes and

Based on performance indicators for picking and order preparation, central distribution centers provide a more cost efficient option. Performance for picking and order preparation efficiency is specified by accurate, cost efficient, and timing on picking and preparing the orders. Picking and order preparation efficiency in a store is low and endures high labor costs per order (Agatz, 2009). With a higher volume demand, distribution centers provide a high picking efficiency, whereas stores provide only a low picking efficiency (Boyer & Hult, 2005).

Gioe Melaney is the general director of Southern Toro – a subsidiary company included in the distribution system of Toron Coporation in Galveston, Taxas.

When offers of reduced pricing are accepted for equipment, meeting delivery expectations becomes an important part of enhancing the customer experience to maintain satisfied loyal customers. An inventory specialist in the current distribution center would be given the additional task of segregating and maintaining inventory levels to meet the needs of the customer loyalty department.

Following considerable investment in new warehouse and carrier management systems the number and quality of delivery options had increased. Now delivery options include: same day, next day or standard delivery options that normally takes around 2-3 days. Also customers can set delivery date by themselves and if wanted can be notified via email or text alerts of delivery status. In addition 85% if orders are tractable

The organization in this study, a multi-billion dollar warehousing and distribution company, has been housed in an old building and will be moved to a new state-of-the-art facility. This move involves the planning, organizing, staging and moving of products from one location to the other. Included in planning needs are signage, warehouse racking placement, warehouseman selector choosing routes, freezer, cooler and dry product placement. Incorporated into this move will be the necessity to deal with contractors who are completing the building as well as contacting all vendors and suppliers to inform them of the change of location and service changes during the two-day transition period. The actual moving of all products will require 16 hours, 30 employees on two shifts at two different locations.

* Intensive planning of daily shipment should be done (calculation of exact amount of goods to be shipped and arrangement of the goods)

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.