Wings And Legs Supply Chain Case Study

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1. The combination of leanness and agility in Wings & Legs’ supply chain
Food industry can be chartered by low margin industry, while along with the shift of power from the manufacturer to the purchaser, the price and demand became flexible, and the product variety increased.
According to Christopher and Towill (2001), there are mainly three ways to combine lean and leagile. The first hybrid approach is the Pareto rule, which means that the dominant 20% of products should use leanness and make to stock. While the remaining 80% products with less share of revenue should use agility. The second hybrid approach is about using lean approach for the base level of demand, while for the peak season or flexible demand, manufacturer can use agility …show more content…

And the labeling process is a very fast operation, which means that the lead time will not be so much increased. And with respect to the contamination risk of semi-finished meat product, postponing the labeling are low in risk. Thus, the feasibility of using postponing the labelling operation is very high.
However, comparing with the current situation, the lead time is longer, the manufacturing cost is a bit higher due to lower economic of scale in the labelling operation. Moreover, even though the inventory is reduced, the overstock problem of particular product types still exist. Which means that the repackaging process still very likely to happen. High remanufacturing cost remains the disadvantage point in this MDP position.
2.3 Postponing the packaging operation
By postponing the decoupling point, the risk of being out of stock and the risk of holding too much stock of products which are not required is significant lower (Ben Naylor, Naim and Berry, 1999). And the flexibility of product type is notably increased. While on the other hand, the lead time will be significantly longer, and the economics of scale in the packaging process is reduced. By making the trade-off between the pros and cons, setting up MDP upstream of the packaging process is the best …show more content…

However, instead of the lean approaches mainly making forecasts according to the EPOS data, the agile approach need to do more work. First of all, demand recording and forecasting. For instance the retailers should make records of the everyday demand and make forecasts of the future demand trend with the help of current demand data. By doing this, Promotions can be forehead noticed and the reaction speed can be improved. Secondly, the information system. The information system is the bridge between different upstream and downstream partners. Thus it is very important for the agility partners improve their information system to smooth the information transfer. For instance, electronic data interchange (EDI), radio frequency identification (RFID), and Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP) system are all good information systems for transferring the EPOS

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