In today’s business environment, a company, such as Kuiper Leda needs to have a clear understanding for the need to have an efficient supply chain management system. This is needed in order to gain a competitive advantage within any desired industry. By creating an understanding of the many various interactions that occur between the system’s manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and its customers, helps to create a more efficient and effective supply chain management system. Examining the supply chain of Kuiper Leda, I will attempt to determine if Kuiper Leda’s practice meets today’s sufficiency for RFIR demands of manufacturing.
Kuiper Leda is currently faced with an opportunity to grow its business by acquiring more and larger clients for its manufactured electronic components. The company needs to ensure that its current supply chain is streamlined. Kuiper Leda, who specializes in producing Electronic Control Units (ECUs), has customers who include manufacturers in the automobile industry and OEMs. The company recently entered into the production line of Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFIS). This production line has only been in operation for a short-time. Kuiper Leda now has many of the same supply management concerns, such as the availability of resources, production capacity, and on time delivery of their products to customers. With its ever fluctuating demand in recent months, it has seemingly taken its affect on Kuiper Leda’s already overloaded supply chain. Having built and maintained a strong reputation with its customers, the company has come to be recognized for its quality and delivery responsiveness. Kuiper Leda is part of a very competitive industry, so it’s no wonder that Kuiper Leda has come to thrive on their client’s repeat orders and their relationships with their suppliers, however, they are careful to acknowledge a clear awareness of its competitors and the business environment. Due to the large scale of operations, Kuiper Leda must focus its immediate attention on the company’s ability to manage their capacity and delivery. With this latest production, there appears to be no uniformity in the current production process, which has left their suppliers struggling to keep up with Kuiper Leda’s customer demands and specific requirements. Although Kuiper Leda must maintain its customer responsiveness, they need to also ensure that the plant or its suppliers are not adversely affected by the increase in demand.
Due primarily to the increase in recent immediate demand, Kuiper Leda‘s current supply chain has become ineffective, therefore, Kuiper Leda has sought to making changes.
Any time the company is looking into software project, there are areas associated with risk such as cost, time and relationship with suppliers. However, for Harley-Davidson, “collocation of suppliers with production facilities and their integration into company’s development process was the essential part of long-term relationship development”. Through a continued focus on collaboration and strong supplier relationships, the company could position itself to achieve strategic objectives and deliver cost and quality improvement over the long-term. Since, at that time company had no centralized system in place to handle relationship with suppliers and consequently, most of company’s time was spent on supplier management activities. For example, reviewing inventory, expediting and data entry. Furthermore, each supplier had different information systems for “Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO), Original Equipment (OE), Parts and Accessories (P&A), and General Merchandising (GM) purchasing activities”. The systems, already provided by supplier, had to be further modified to meet individual need at each location, such as “the OE system at Harley-Davidson’s York, Pennsylvania site was different from the OE system in Kansas City”. However, due to long-standing tradition of gradual change implementation and focus on quality, quick transitions were unwelcome and did not come easy for the company. The size of the project determined how much risk was involved in terms of cost, time, and supplier relationships. The idea of switching to global purchasing system was seen as a threat not only in supplies and production flow interruption, but also in damaged dealer/customer relationships and lost sales. Furthermore, failure of the sy...
Metalcraft’s scorecard was developed to address control issues in the supply-chain. The scorecard was a tool that provided Melalcraft a single reference point on supplier performance over a period of time along three dimensions: quality, timing and delivery. There were several business functions that utilized the scorecard; buyers, plant engineers, supplier development engineers, suppliers and various other users within the Metalcraft organization. The scorecard was also used to evaluate supplier performance at both the individual plant level as well as the aggregate supplier level. The scorecard classified supplier performance metrics with color recommendations indicating the degree in which Metalcraft would base future sourcing based on their “color” quality rating.
It is important to identify the customer facing processes and use the demand chain with the supply chain in order to focus on the entire value chain for both the customer and the stakeholder (Walters & Rainbird, 2007). Understanding your customers and markets can help you determine where to look in the supply chain for efficiencies and opportunities and areas where you can improve. Therefore, the focus is primarily on customer’s product demands and service, quality, price competitive, while increasing performance and adding value. Target uses EDI software to make procurement easier and requires all suppliers to use EDI for the procurement process allowing them to ensure customer satisfaction by having state of the art technology that’s fast and
What are the key issues (sub-problems) that need to be resolved in order to solve the main problem? There are several important issues Dave Richardson must address in analyzing this problem. First, he must anticipate what issues may arise during the implementation phase of this project and how it may affect the company moving from a make-to-stock to a make-to-order system. Secondly, he must improve upon Nissan Canada’s Inc.’s current inferior demand forecasting issues. This system, through the utilization of spreadsheets, telephones, fax, and emails as a form of communication with dealers, extends the order processing times. Lastly, there is currently a three-month window for assembly plants and suppliers in receiving orders that add to the
Introduction Bytes Products Inc. is one of the largest suppliers of the production of electronics components in the Midwest. The annual sales of these products are at its records high and now it’s becoming hard for the company to keep up with the increased demand. James M Eliot is the CEO and chairman of the board, is trying to address the problem faced by the company to meet the demand of its product. Currently Bytes products dominate the market with a good 32% market share. Mr. Eliot is trying to solve the problem to constantly dominate the market by increase the number of plants they currently have, so they can meet the demand.
In the 1960s through the 1970s, companies realized strong engineering, design, and manufacturing functions were strong market strategy keys to create and capture customer loyalty. As the demand for new products rose in the 1980s, these market requirements were to increase their flexibility and responsiveness to adapt existing products and processes or to develop new ones in order to meet customer needs. As manufacturing improved in the 1990s, managers began noticing material and service inputs involving suppliers and their major impact on an organization’s ability to meet customer needs. As a result of these changes, organizations now find that it difficult to manage their own organizations. First, they must be involved in the management of their network of all upstream firms that provide directly or indirectly, as well as the network of downstream firms, which are responsible for delivery and market service of the product to the end customer. In order to succeed, managers have to realize that they cannot do it alone and they must work together on a daily basis with the whole organizations in their supply chains. Because supply chain management involves all functions within an organization, managers need to know what a supply chain is, why it is important, and the impact of supply chain management on the success and profitability of their organization. Today, Wal-Mart topped the list of the America’s biggest companies on the Fortune 500 list, “with sales of almost $345 billion — more than a quarter of a trillion dollars” (Forbs). Wal-Mart’s supply chain management is becoming recognized as a core competitive strategy.
Understanding the changes in the market and the growth of e-commerce prompted the organization to invest heavily in its supply chain management forecasting and management system. The development of a network of distribution centers and Direct Fulfillment Centers to position the company to capitalize on the growing e-commerce market indicate a strong understanding of the need to adapt to changing market forces. The company spent over $300 million on new distribution center facilities in 2014 alone, and continues to expand to maintain efficiency in product movement (Cassidy,
In order to have both an effective and efficient supply chain, managers should be focused on trying to achieve not only a cost effective supply chain, but a flexible one. In today’s economy, because the market is so volatile, trendy, and competitive, flexibility is the key to success. In order to respond to customers’ ever-increasing requirement demands, market leaders have positioned themselves well by continually investing in new key performance indicators, additional technology, improved supply chain networks, and streamlining efforts (Source One INC, 2013). This helps to maximize flexibility and overall responsiveness. With increased flexibility, leaders recognize that supply chains must be adjusted to meet different customer needs. In my research I will analyze Gate Gourmet’s use of information technology and the importance of supply chain integration.
The global supply chain variability is causing customer delivery delayed by around 40% and also experiencing quality problems that is introduced by the humidity difference between the locations of Chinese manufacturing plants. Moreover, it is taking much longer to deliver products, and the spare parts preventing any timely customer services. The goal is to come up with a faster product delivery and product cycle employing strategic and tactical changes that might improve supply chain problem and address the quality and increase customer
The report highlights in detail the role and the importance of Supply Chain Management (SCM) in an organization with respect to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and its growing impact in the industry and talks about the changing SCM trends keeping RFID as the focal point.
Supply chain management has been defined as that process that involves the management of information, materials, and all the finances that are handled within and across the entire supply chain process (Christopher, 2016). The management is usually done through out the entire supply chain management from that moment when the suppliers are involved through all the manufacturing activities, different distribution activities, and the way that the products are served to the final product consumer (Turban, et al., 2002). The process also includes all the activities that different organizations offers to their customers as after sale services for purposes perfecting their services and products towards their highly valued customers (Christopher,
UK Morepeth facility, the company’s ability to integrate over seas businesses and ramp up of
All these improvements will boost profitability by identifying at least or more that EUR 30 mio required by U.S.A headquarters. However, we believe it is not realistic to manage all this turnaround in 1 year’s time. It might take from 2 – 3 years.
The ability to manage supply chains effectively is a key component of corporate success. Adopting a supply chain management strategy (inventory strategy) that works to minimize costs, enhance quality and efficiency of products and services rendered, and maintain sufficient levels of inventory while reducing associated carrying costs is ideal for all businesses. Achieving such a goal, however, is quite challenging and most businesses adopt inventory strategies that best enable them to fulfill their most primary needs (e.g. reducing inventory costs and delivering high-quality products). Supply chain management relates to “the management and coordination of a products supply chain for the purpose of increasing efficiency and profitability” (Investopedia, 2008). In order to deliver quality products to customers in a timely manner while decreasing operating costs, businesses must have a sound understanding of supply chain management (SCM) and all that it entails.
This is the activity carried out by organizations that own production sites, and their performance has a major impact on product cost, quality, speed of delivery and delivery reliability, and flexibility [8]. As it is quite an important part of the supply chain, production needs to be measured and continuously improved. Suitable metrics for the production level are as follows. Order lead-time, the total order cycle time, called order to delivery cycle time, refers to the time elapsed in between the receipt of customer order until the delivery of finished goods to the customer. The reduction in order cycle time leads to reduction in supply chain response time, and as such is an important performance measure and source of competitive advantage [9]. It directly interacts with customer service in determining competitiveness. Range of product and services: According to [8] a plant that manufactures a broad product range is likely to introduce new products more slowly than plants with a narrow product range. Plants that can manufacture a wide range of products are likely to perform less well in the areas of value added per employee, speed and delivery reliability. This clearly suggests that product range affects supply chain performance. Effectiveness of scheduling techniques is another important measure of supply chain effectiveness. Scheduling refers to the time or date on or by which