Essay On Inventory Management

1. Understand and identify supply chain issues and constraints faced by aircraft parts manufacturers like HAL and contrast it from supply chains of other industries 2. Apply basic economic order quantity model to make inventory decisions 3. To analyze supply chain system with serial manufacturing fraught with uncertainties and variations in processing times 4. Use probability models to estimate the probability of on-time delivery under different scenarios 5. Estimate the penalty cost for not meeting the delivery guarantees 6. Demonstrate the use of advanced stochastic models to optimize the use of shelf life parts in the supply chain 7. Summarize mathematical complexity associated with the problem and provid

Using Supply-Chain Management to reduce space and investment requirements while maintaining adequate service levels is that when an effective supply-chain management, Wolf Motors can streamline the acquisition processes and maintain efficient inventory control while reducing unnecessary inventory warehousing. Wolf Motors could analyze the historical inventory turnover rates to diagnose the appropriate range of supplies that should be on hand in each and every category. Wolf

The timing of capacity changes also needs to be taken into consideration to achieve maximum efficenty given that demands of their products varies with seasonal changes. The ability to react to market demand changes quickly will determine manufacturers flexibility in keeping up with these demands. Manufacturers needs facilities to produce, whether warehouses to store its raw materials or finished goods, or manufacturing plants to produce their products. Services facilities are needed by certain manufacturing industries such as consumer electronics to cater for returns. Distribution centres also determine the efficenty of production distribution and un-nesessary inventory holding will result in higher holding cost. Such facilities require large investments and are integral of the manufacturer’s supply chain strategy and thus proper planning is needed when making these decisions regardong the size, location which affect the overall operations. How manufacturers run their productions also determine how successful will they be in terms of productivity and quality levels. Different types of equipment and processes also affect the cost and output of the manufacturing plant. Information systems that flow both upstream and downstream affects the forecasting, planning, inventory and production levels, they must be robust to ensure the manufacturing firm is able to react accordingly to changing demands and variations. In addition to their internal environment,

The average lead time of a corporation is 15 weeks from production to consumption. Benchmark firms have a lead time of 8 weeks which is the goal for the supply chain (Heizer & Render 2010). The 8 week number will be achieved by analyzing opportunities to streamline the process thereby creating efficiencies and driving down the amount of time it takes to produce and ship products. Setting a goal for an 8 week lead time will give the firm an opportunity to assess their forecasting and production capabilities presenting a way to identify and address inefficiencies.

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.

Operations management (OM) is that phase of an organization where inputs are put into operations to acquire required output (services) without compromising on quality. In other words operations management is also described as combining and transforming various resources in the operations sub-system into value added services in line with formulated policies of the organization. (Kumar and Suresh, 2009)

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 data can easily loss because they only use a logbook to record their inventory data. With the system, it will help more on the security of the data. Inventory loss hard to detect because admin need to review one by one page in the logbook, but with the system developed, it may help the admin to detect the inventory in and out from the

* Since no inventory is maintained at near-by locations, the goods will have to be fetched from central warehouse thereby increasing lead time.

A common way of decreasing the amount of inventory a business holds on a daily basis is implementing a just-in-time inventory process. A Just-In-Time inventory system means that the business gets the materials for a product, as they are demanded. “The electronic data

Apple Inc. is a manufacturing company that produces and markets mobile and media devices, personal computers, and portable digital music players. In addition to these devices, they also sell a variety of software, services, peripherals, networking solutions, and third-party digital content and applications that can be accessed through the devices. Some of these popular devices that are manufactured and sold by the company include Macintosh computers, iPhones, iPods, and iPads. The Macintosh computer may be the most popular device that has been created by Apple. When it was released in 1984, it became the first computer to successfully use a Graphical User Interface. This allowed users to navigate the device by selecting pictures on the screen by using the click of a mouse. The success of this creation inspired the development of modern computers. It helped to launch the use of the Graphical User Interface that most modern-day computers use today.

According to [5], Just-in-Time (JIT) inventory management enables an organization to gain competitive advantage by not having a large or excessive amount of inventory in warehouse. The organization only needs to order the parts when they are actually needed and new materials are produced only when old materials have finished. One advantage of adopting this strategy is that there will be no excess of inventory that needs to be stored and hence the inventory levels will be reduced as well as the cost of carrying and storing goods. One major disadvantage of this is that the organization will expose it in the risk of ordering problems for example a supplier is not able to provide parts on time. The result of this is that the organization cannot fulfill the order and contributes to customer dissatisfaction.

Inventory itself is a list of products that a company has available for sale to customers. So what is Inventory Management? By definition according to BusinessDictionary.com, “Inventory Management is policies, procedures, and techniques employed in maintaining the optimum number or amount of each inventory item”.