Operations Management & Decision Making – Planning And Control Assignment
The organisation I have chosen to examine from an operations management and decision making standpoint is McDonald’s, a worldwide chain of fast food restaurants, which are run either by a franchise, an affiliate or by the corporation itself. There are over 31,000 branches of McDonald’s worldwide1. It is estimated these restaurants serve a collective 47 million customers daily2. The restaurants mainly sell customers traditional fast food fare such as burgers, cheeseburgers, French fries, fizzy drinks and milkshakes, in addition to breakfast, dessert items and (in response to growing health concerns in the consumer marketplace) healthier items such as salads and
The presence of buffer inventories however does not eradicate the need for anticipation inventories to be prepared for days of anticipated busyness, as I described when discussing the role of capacity management in the company, supply chain management must be up to scratch to deliver the extra stock needed to create an anticipation inventory.9 Inventories on non-frozen stock are replenished at regular intervals, using the periodic review approach (new stock being brought in at set time intervals), while frozen stock inventories are replenished with the continuous review approach (stocks are replenished once inventories reach a certain level and require topping up). 9
As with any fast food retailer, supply chain planning and control is key to ensuring effective inventory management, and as such is a key area of planning and control which McDonald’s pays attentive care to. In creating a good supply network McDonald’s is careful of achieving key supply chain objectives, with the end goal of course being to satisfy the needs of the company’s customers. McDonalds in the UK has been putting focus on selecting quality suppliers within recent years, particularly in the selection of beef to use in hamburgers, proclaiming that their beef is “Sourced from over 16,000 British and Irish farms”10, playing on the public opinion of British beef as being of high quality. The fact that the Beef is sourced from over 16,000 farms displays that McDonald’s are clearly