Wedgwoods Supply Chain Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Wedgwoods Supply Chain Management - Essay Example Rudzki et.al) Planning: A strategy is to be developed for the cost-effective utilization of resources required to develop the product that meets the demands of customer. The planning of the supply chain thus should be such that it is efficient, less costly and the products that are delivered are of high quality and value to customers. Source: The important thing is finding suppliers, who can effectively deliver the services or goods to the customers. An improvement in the relationship should be developed with the suppliers for delivery, payment process and pricing. In short, improving the processes for the management of inventories received from the suppliers including receiving, verifying shipments, transferring to the manufacturing facilities and authorizing payments to the suppliers. Making: This is the step, manufacturing step, where intensive study is required to improve the quality levels, production out-put and workers productivity. For the effective delivery of the goods, there should be scheduling of activities such as testing, packaging and preparation for the delivery. Delivering: This is referred to as logistics, there should be an improvement in the coordination of the activities such as taking the receipt of orders from customers, developing a network of warehouses, picking the carriers so that customers receive the products and setting up an effective in-voice system for payments. Returning: The most important and the problematic part of the supply chain that needs improvement is creating a network for receiving defective and excessive products from the customers and checking the delivered products which have problems and supporting customers with problems. Operation management issues at Wedgwood: The company adopted the inflexible push model which is driven by the forecasts of the expected sales which were generated centrally, and the challenge for the company is now that the company is finding hard, to match the high quality of the product with equal levels of service to the customers. According to the operations director of the company, when benchmarking was done with the other companies, they found out that there is a need for improvement in the area of customer service and responsiveness. The overdue orders were high, despite there were high inventory levels. The main objectives of the company is thus to reduce inventory, cutting the supply cycle time. The company therefore has decided to overhaul the supply chain processes to achieve the goals. As identified by the experts of operations management of the company, in three areas of the supply chain. Dealing with customers and order fulfilling is the first one, the second area is operations in the manufacturing and supply, the third one is introducing new products To tackle the problems, the company formed different teams to tackle each area, the teams were instructed to look into the key processes which are existing and bench mark them against the other parties so that they can redesign. The teams were supported by the methodology and expertise from the consultancy wing of the Texas instruments. The main objectives of the company are reducing the inventory, cutting the supply cycle time and overall improvement of the customer services. (Buy IT, 2002). Key performance objectives at Wedgwood: Existing model has been changed to the pull model driven by the real demand from the customers, even this new