Modern Supply Chain And Traditional Distribution Channels

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.

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

Logistics is one of the main functions within a company, and the supply chain is a complex and sometime fragile global endeavor dependent on a network of independent, yet interconnected, moving parts. It requires professional management. Supply chain professionals order the product, build it, move it, ship it, distribute it, and drive the coordination processes with marketing, sales, engineering, manufacturing, finance, and information technology. In short, they make any business effort seem effortless.

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.

Supply chain, its management, performance measures and improvement approaches. As an extension of the systems point of view, the system dynamics inherent in the supply chain are illustrated and the coordination in the supply chain is emphasized. Five areas where measurement of supply chain performance should be made are discussed. The five areas are on-time delivery, quality, time (business cycle) total delivered cost and flexibility.

In supply chain management there is a million in one ways a company can approach its warehouses, suppliers, and stores utilizing different strategies to ensure they are distributing the right amount of merchandise. Failure to deliver the right amount of merchandise at the right time could lead to the supply chain management losing tons of money over wrongly timed delivered items.

Discuss, using examples, how the relationship between operations in a supply chain can affect way the chain works.

The globalization of organizations and more competitive forces have compelled more manufacturing businesses to improve an efficient supply chain planning for reducing the cost of supply chain. Planning of supply chain is being the critical component of business’ management. Supply chains have conventionally been split, being unsuccessful to assimilate the business utilities in the chain of logistics process. Such difficulties, as extended order lead times, high inventory costs, and struggle in answering proactive to real time variations, having lower profits and weak client goodwill that can be determined by putting together supply chain management schemes for transportation and warehousing. Supply chain can be explained as a combined practice where actually numerous different organizations individuals such as manufactures, retailers, distributors, and suppliers perform together in order to obtain raw materials, transform these raw materials into wanted ultimate products and supply these ultimate products to the vendors. The key methods in this combined procedure are the distribution, logistics, production planning and control. The production and planning steps are two of the most crucial parts to obtain worldwide optimization in supply chain management. And, this should be explained inside the integrated planning infrastructure. Interactive parts of supply chain included key parts such as purchase, production, logistics planning, sale, production and manufacturing

To maintain a business, supply chain management needs strong certainties on the everyday action of the business from all accomplices in the supply chain. To spare cost and convey more products to more destinations quicker, a business and their suppliers must have an institutionalized supply chain. The test is to place the emphasis on stock inventory management instead of information management (Spiegeleire, 2015). The absences of supply chain measures will build the expense of inventory management, funds are forestalled and advantage opportunities over your supply chain are lessened. Setting guidelines in the

Barilla SpA, a large vertical integrated corporation that makes pasta and bread products is experiencing rising costs due to extreme variability in demand from its distributors. In order to improve company’s sale margins, Giorgio Magialli, the Director of Logistics at Barilla suggests to implement a Just-In-Time Distribution (JITD) system. The JITD system is a continuous replenishment distribution strategy, which the responsibility for determining inventory quantities shifts

The department store this individual report is about is a UK brand which serves middle-class people and has 40 stores around the country. It has a large diversity of distribution channels and it has started using the “buy and collect” concept but has not been successful in all locations. For these reasons, it needs improvement of the distribution channels and customer insights in order to find out why the “buy and collect” concept has been working only in certain locations. This individual report will cover which type of distribution channel should be used for our department store and for what reason. It will include examples of successful brands using the same type of distribution channel and how they have achieved their success. Another thing needed for a good distribution channel are good intermediaries. In order to have a successful and well managed distribution channel, there is a need of a right type of intermediary for this particular department store. The second thing this individual report covers is the “buy and collect” concept, what it is and an example of a successful brand which has been using it. Improvement of customer insights is also essential. What a customer insight is and what different things can be done in order to improve it will be discovered. Knowing your customers is a significant part of a successful business because it helps you serve them best and find out why the “buy and collect” concept is being used only in some locations.

industry. The paper critically evaluates the existing supply chain of the company against its current performance and

Effective supply chain has gained a very high prominence in the current market scenario. The numerous amounts of demands from the customers has increased significantly over the past decades. They not only expect a reliable and good quality product/service, they also want it to be delivered to them well in time. The decline in product life cycle and the quick

The class text states that Supply chain management is frequently divided into supply chain planning applications, supply chain execution applications, logistics management, and warehouse management. Often when companies fail at implementing an efficient supply chain because of the planning section, or inaccurate demand forecasts. The text states electronic data interchange is one of the earliest uses of information technology for supply chain management, Electronic data interchange is the use of the Internet for everyday business transactions. “In this era of information a firm’s supply chain should operate at speed of thought and this is possible only by enhanced e-speed communications and information sharing with their critical partners.” (4)

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.