Case Study: Kiwi Kanines

As Diane is improving her pipeline management, she must also learn how to enhance her supply chain agility. Supply chain agility is the fulfillment process that eliminates uncertainty by postponing the finality of a product until the order is received, and then rapidly responding to fulfill that order. This type of fulfillment is best for less predicable environments where the demand for variety is high. For Kiwi Kanines, this fulfillment strategy will be the most effective for her domestically order products, as the products from New Zealand have too long of a lead-time for Diane to be able to rapidly respond to. Focusing on her domestic orders, Diane should enhance her supply chain agility through the synchronization of activities, the reduction

There are eight main types of customer complexity: network complexity, process complexity, range complexity, product complexity, customer complexity, supplier complexity, organizational complexity, and information complexity. There are ways that Diane can reduce each of these complexities, but rather than briefly touching on all of them, I will really investigate on how Diane can reduce her range complexity. Range complexity occurs as you increase the number of products being sold. This then causes the demand per variant to decrease, which has many negative effects such as harder forecasting and inventory buildup. In regards to the sale of the Model T car, Henry Ford once said, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” By saying this, Ford has greatly reduced his range complexity to near nothing as they were only going to sell one product with zero variation. While I know that Diane does not want to only sell one version of one product in Kiwi Kanines, she can still reduce her range complexity helping her agility. She is currently selling dog food sourced from both New Zealand and St. Louis, MO, pet toys and accessories from both New Zealand and Nashville, TN, and pet containment systems also sourced domestically. While it is important for Diane to keep some of her sourcing from New Zealand, as that is what sets Kiwi

Depending on how Diane measures performance will influence the way that she runs her business. The best way for Diane to measure her performance is linking it to the customer. It is important for Diane to ask herself, “did the customer have DIFOTIS- delivery in-full on-time in-spec?” for each customer order. In the world of business, everything revolved around the customer and the customer’s satisfaction. It would be easy to have a really efficient business, as you would only sell one products with the greatest profit margin, so that you could truly maximize your profits, lower costs, and better use your capacity. However, if Diane were to focus and measure your performance on efficiency, then she would be loosing her specialty of having the variation of products from around the world. Instead of efficiency, Diane should evaluate Kiwi Kanines through the lens of effectiveness. Is she effectively selling her products to the customers? Are the customers effectively receiving those products happily? Diane needs to become the supplier of choice to her customers so that she can have high customer reaction thus giving Diane more agility in her supply chain. While it is important to have some efficiency in lowering costs, that cannot be Diane’ main focus when measuring her performance. Diane should evaluate Kiwi Kanines through the effectiveness in relations to her