Supply Chain Management
1. You are a SCM consultant appointment by a Pharma company who wants to lease a warehouse in a Metro like Mumbai. Considering short term life cycle of following FIFO, maintaining safety stocks & quick retrieval is extremely critical. Considering high rentals in Metro, leasing space is equally critical. Movement of material fairly depends on -customer’s requirement as forecasted; the process of which is fairly established. Please suggest steps that consultant should keep in mind to suggest solution to his Pharma clients for inventory management. Do you think VMI concept may help here for non-shelf life kind of items here?
2. With the Independence Day around the corner, Small Basket a grocery retailer has announced “Drop till you shop” offer wherein it is offering online groceries at rock bottom prices. Tempted by the attractive prices, Mrs. Chandru decides to shop using the Small Basket app. When she browses the app, she discovers too many appealing deals, and as a result shops much more than what she normally would have. When Small Basket launched this scheme in 2015, they sold goods worth Rs. 26 million. Encouraged by the response, they ran the scheme for three days in 2017. During this three day period, approximately two million people shopped for a variety of produce. There were reports that the company experienced out of stock situation for stocks of several popular items (grocery and staples, fruits and vegetables) that had been exhausted. Predicting the demand for such schemes is always a tricky job. How do you think Small Basket can forecast better to avoid stock-outs in this case? Do firms that forecast correctly rely on cross-functional as well as cross-organizational trust? (With suppliers and distributors). Justify your answer.
3. Starbucks is pretty much a household name in India now. But like many of the most successful worldwide brands, the coffee shop giant has been through its periods of supply chain pain. In fact, during 2007 and 2008, Starbucks leadership began to have serious doubts about the company’s ability to supply its 16,700 outlets globally. As in most commercial sectors at that time, sales were falling. At the same time though, supply chain costs rose by more than $75 million.
Supply Chain Cost Reduction Challenges
When the supply chain executive team began investigating the rising costs and supply chain performance issues, they found that service was indeed falling short of expectations. Findings included the following problems
- Fewer than 50% of outlet deliveries were arriving on time
- A number of poor outsourcing decisions had led to excessive 3PL expenses
- The supply chain had, (like those of many global organisions) evolved, rather than grown by design, and had hence become unnecessarily complex
The Path to Cost Reduction
Starbucks’ leadership had three main objectives in mind to achieve improved performance and supply chain cost reduction. These were to:
- Reorganize the supply chain
- Reduce cost to serve
- Lay the groundwork for future capability in the supply chain
In order to meet these objectives, Starbucks divided all its supply chain functions into four key groups, known as “plan” “make” and “deliver”. It also opened a new production facility, bringing the total number of U.S. plants to four. Next, the company set about terminating partnerships with all but its most effective 3PLs. The remaining partners were then managed via a weekly scorecard system, which was aligned with renewed service level agreements.
Supply Chain Cost Management Results
By the time Starbucks’ supply chain transformation program was completed, the company had made savings of more than $500 million over the course of 2009 and 2010, of which a large proportion came out of the supply chain, according to Peter Gibbons, then Executive Vice President of Global Supply Chain Operations.
a. What is the significant and substantial change according to you is taken by Starbucks to improve on overall performance of their supply chain.
b. How do you think objective laid down by Starbucks Leadership would have helped them to achieve this sustainable improvement in supply chain?