1. The trading industry is a complex one that involves dealing with many different stakeholders while making strategic alliances with suppliers of raw materials, manufacturers and transporters. A porters 5 forces analysis reveals that the suppliers in this industry (including those that supply raw materials and those that manufacture) are highly fragmented and are high in number. As a result no single supplier firm commands a dominant market share in their respective product markets. Trading companies not only have more negotiation power on the bargaining table but also establish guidelines, which their suppliers must follow. As a result suppliers to this industry do not wield much bargaining power.
The buyers of the services rendered by this industry include large multi national corporations that outsource their supply chain management activities as it is outside their core competencies. Some customers are extremely large volume buyers and as a result have a large amount of influence on the price of these services. The cost of switching between traders is small and the process quick, therefore buyers that are price sensitive are very likely to switch to those traders who can supply the same goods for a lower price. But even though there are many traders in the industry, only a handful have distinguished themselves because of their large global sourcing and manufacturing networks, such companies can even charge a premium for their services as they deliver extremely high levels of value and quality. Thus although buyers in this industry are price sensitive, there is a constant struggle between value for money (quality, timely delivery, customer service) and low cost.
The trading industry lacks any significant barriers to entry t...
... middle of paper ...
... network allowing them to organize their functions as if they were different steps in the manufacturing process. Typically they will only use 30-70% of the supplier’s capacity thus allowing for flexibility and access to new suppliers. This also prevented suppliers from becoming completely dependant on Li & Fung. Even the contracts that Li & Fung entered into with these companies had a clearly defined exit strategy that gave Li & Fung enough power to drop a supplier without hassle if the need be. In order to improve suppliers’ performance Li & Fung provided them with feedback on their production quality and timeliness, those suppliers that were performing poorly were dropped and new ones were found to take their place. Li & Fung was a “smokeless factory” which did not own any manufacturing facilities but was deeply involved in their management and production processes.
Suppliers must maintain good relations with the companies in the industry. This is low because there are multiyear service contracts and the delivery industry uses items such as vehicles, employee benefits, general goods and airline contracts associated with overhead of running business, but all contracts are rewarded through an RFP process. There are enough players in the market and had high fixed cost and thus have substantial buying power.
Outsourcing manufacturing services to a network of suppliers can provide organizations the ability to adjust the production capability upward or downward, at a lower cost, when trying to match the demand conditions. Outsourcing can also decrease the product design cycle time
There are two fundamental sorts of supply chains today and they are called business-to-business supply ties and business to shopper supply chains. Business-to-Business supply fastens will be alluded to as B2B, and Business to Consumer as B2C in this paper. The real contrast in the middle of B2B and B2C supply chains is the measure of channels that an item goes through before coming to the end client. B2B supply chains have less channels generally and are bigger in size though B2C supply chains have a bigger measure of littler channels
A supplier is a company that provides services and goods that meets their consumers’ wants and needs. All supply companies want to feel valued by the company that they supply, that’s the aim of the suppliers. When the demand for finished goods at Debenhams, for example: Rocha John Rocha jeans, the businesses are more likely to supply their consumers more. This depends on the raw materials’ availability and if the suppliers are willing to supply Debenhams with more finished goods. The competition for raw materials to produce the jeans may be a bit difficult to buy because the demand for the materials is higher and the suppliers may not have enough raw materials to sell to produce the
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.
Rao, K., and Young, R. R. (1994) Global supply chains: Factors influencing outsourcing of logistics functions. International journal of physical distribution and logistics management. Vol. 24. No. 6.
Quickly becoming apparent after only a few rounds of play was in the absence of coordinating direction the individual supply chain links immediately focused upon acting in their own best interests much more so than the organization as a whole. Whether the end use customer was satisfied became secondary to avoiding stock outages for the next link in the chain, or their specific “upstream customer”. The real world application of this example is that focus on the end use customer must be consistent and maintained throughout the process up to and including delivery. Undoubtedly internal customers, such as retailers to wholesalers and distributors to production, must be serviced along the way for the transaction to ultimately occur. However, unless an end use customer is involved no profit can be realized by anyone.
In many instances, firms have not considered the impact of their actions on the supply chain and its long-term competitiveness and profitability. According to Wisner et al (2006), the “I win, you lose” silo mentality manifests itself in the form of using cheaper suppliers, paying little attention to the needs of customers, and assigning few resources to new products and service design. Eventually, these firms will create quality, cost, delivery timing, and other customer service problems that are detrimental to the supply chain. Cachon (2005), in his paper, describes silo mentality as the most significant barrier to overcome most of in supply chain management. Internally, the silo effect can also be exist among departments. The transportation manager for instance, may be trying to reduce annual transportation costs while inadvertently cause safety stocks to be higher, shortages, and to deteriorate customer service level. In order to overcome the silo mentality, the enterprise must strive to align supply chain goals and the goals and objective of the firm. Functional and decisions must be made while considering the impact on the entire enterprise profit and those of the supply chain.
The market players, which in this case are leading pharmaceutical companies, would normally buy supplies, such as active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), from major suppliers that form sub-sector of the chemical industry. These are provided on a contractual basis and most pharmaceutical companies face high switching costs if they decide to change suppliers. That is why a number of these companies decided to invest in chemical manufacturing and become partially self- sufficient. Another way in which these market players are able to reduce the supplier power is through purchasing their raw materials from multiple suppliers; since their laboratory equipment and chemical ingredients show little differentiation in between vendors.
In a traditional manufacturing company, the supply chain covers the following roles: suppliers, labour, engineering, production, product, quality assurance, inventory, competitors and customers. The last role, that of customers, is different from the rest of the roles within a classic supply chain, meaning that suppliers are oriented upstream, while customers downstream; the labour is situated internally, while customers are external; engineering is done only by qualified engineers; production is protected from customers; products represent the offering that the customers obtain; quality assurance prevents faulty products to get to the customers; inventory can be managed in order to saturate the demand in time; and finally competitors offer customers different choices to satisfy their needs. Taking separately, the customer role in the traditional supply chain often resumes at “selecting, paying for, and using the outputs” and sometimes proving feed-back and promoting a company’s offerings by recommending to others (Sampson and Spring,
The bargaining power of suppliers is very low. Major players are vertically integrated for example KKD is producing their own equipment while others are partnering up with suppliers.
Today’s organizations are faced with increasing levels of global competition, customer’s demanding value for their money and high stakeholders expectations on investment returns. Gattorna (2003), notes that firms are now pursuing supply chain management as a strategy to competitive advantage. Firms in a supply chain relate, transact, and partner on different levels; from product design and development to product delivery. Through supply chain management a firm pursues value creation through timely product delivery, cost management, inventory control and customer service (Beamon, 1999).They do so individually or through synergies formed with other organizations to increase customer service
Li & Fung is a global trading group sourcing and managing the supply chain for high volume, time sensitive consumer goods. The group is associated with strong brands such as The Limited, Gymboree, American Eagle, Warner Brothers, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Levi-Strauss. With the rise of the internet, and the thrive of the B2B intermediaries, this memo will discuss the Li & Fung's E-Commerce strategy and how to use internet to facilitate supply chain management.
For example, if one supplier was to perform below and an auto industries standard then other options open up for the industry and that supplier could be replaced very easily. Recently, auto industries and suppliers have moved toward a system called a tier based system, where the auto industries would contract with a limited amount of suppliers and then those suppliers would contract products with an upstream market. The shift has been very good for the suppliers and has led to an increasement of power for
As pointed by Parsons A.L (2002), there was increasing dependent on the relationship and customers is demanding to receive high standard of products and services for them to sustain the business in the intense manufacturing environment. Besides, Xu et al. (2008) has highlighted that supplier is developing a long-term relationship with their crucial suppliers to increase the competitiveness and to establish an effective and efficient supply chain. Trend (2005) also mentioned that work closely in partnership with suppliers is the only way to survive in today’s competitive business environment.