Realco Breadmaster Company

1. Why would demand forecasting make sense in a “make to stock” situation? It projects the standard components needed so that the product can be made after customer receiving a customer order.

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.

Supply-chain management consists of developing a strategy to organize, control, and motivate the resources involved in the flow of services and materials within the supply chain. A supply chain strategy, an essential aspect of supply chain management, seeks to design a firm’s supply chain to meet the competitive priorities of the firm’s operations strategy.

Barilla, the leading pasta manufacturer in Italy, faces increasing problems related to demand fluctuation. Their distributors also suffer from high inventory holding costs and low service levels on the other hand. This report explains, why the company and their distributors are troubled with this situation and how Barilla intends to solve it. The problem Barilla experiences is called the “Bullwhip Effect”, i.e. that demand variability increases when moving up the supply chain. Several factors enforce this Bullwhip Effect, e.g. high lead times, poor demand forecasting, and batch ordering. In this report we will point out, that exactly those aspects can be identified as the underlying reasons for Barilla’s problems. In a

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

Nordstrom has famously been known for its lean retail prices and its tight inventory. Nordstrom uses demand forecasting to minimize leftover inventory. Nordstrom’s total corporate management is based on two main goals. One is to associate purchasing with demand to keep inventory as lean as possible. Second is to present customers and sales associates with a wide-ranging view of Nordstrom’s entire inventory, including all stores and warehouses. Nordstrom relates purchasing with demand to keep inventory lean and show customers and employees Nordstrom’s inventory. Nordstrom keeps its items in stock for an extremely short period of time so that if a customer wants it, they only have

Management 460 is a case studies course in the management of manufacturing and service processes and operations. The course addresses manufacturing and service process selection and analysis, forecasting, capacity planning, aggregate

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

Supply chain management is a practice that involves the planning, supervision, and implementation of strategies and controls to direct the movement of goods and services provided to customers. The intent of this essay is to incorporate a synopsis of existing literature and to provide the reader with a general understanding of how supply chain management correlates with the organizational design and structure of modern firms. The essay comprehensively reviews the components of supply chain management and their integration with functional areas within an organization. The information presented in this essay

Operations Management in an organisation is repsonsible for managing and in making decisions concerning the activities that convert inputs into outputs , that is goods and services. This covers both short term actvities as well as longer term activities to meet strategic goals. Inputs can be the raw materaials need to manufacture goods such as furniture or the computers needed to create a service like online shopping site. Operation management’s role is to make decisions to improve how operation activities function, for example, to improve the final quality of the output or to change production methods to be more efficient in terms of cost and in time.

Operations management focuses on managing the processes of producing and distributing products and services. Operations activities often include product creation, development, production and distribution. It deals with all operations within the organization. Related activities include managing purchases, inventory control, quality control, storage, logistics and evaluations. The nature of how operations management is carried out in an organization depends very much on the nature of products or services in the organization, for example, retail, manufacturing, wholesale, etc.

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

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.

This essay attempts to investigate make-to-stock (MTS), make-to-order(MTO) and make-to-forecast(MTF) strategies used in production logistics and find out the ways in which they differ or are similar to push and pull strategies.

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.