Supply Chain Management Individual Assignment-2

The remaining sessions of SCM turned out to be very interesting and gave an overview of the remaining issues global supply chain management firms deal with regards to performance, integration, benchmarking, maintaining customer relationships and dealing with some of the contemporary issues related to supply chain management.
The Session 5 was about building high performance supply chains and how big firms like Wal-Mart, manage their sourcing and distribution and also help in building a sustainable environment. The SBR on Wal-Mart helped us understand how they eliminated unwanted nodes and by sharing relevant information and implementing modern IT techniques. Wal-Mart also helps in creating sustainable environment by reducing carbon footprint generated from the goods carrying trucks. We also learned about the how the use of vendor managed inventory program could lead to economies of scale, however, there are some conditions which need to be fulfilled in order to have maximum benefit out of it. The case also talked about disintermediation, global sourcing, field intelligence, standard packaging, cross docking, real time info on stock levels and non-union labour. The case study of Triple-A supply chain by Lee explains the use of Adaptability, Agility and Alignment to achieve various objectives in order to achieve various objectives of supply chains in modern day dynamic world. Lee points out that efficiency are required else the firm will lose its competitive advantage in the market. He further talks about the perils on cost efficiency and how agility should match with adaptability. Companies need to foster agility in order to achieve the desired results and remain competitive in market. The example of Seven Eleven Japan explained how the use of 3A`s has helped the company to stay ahead of its rivals in tough times. The other article on “Don’t tweak SCM rethink it” gave views on the importance of environment sustainability and how it is important for a company to not perform this itself but also work with their suppliers and competitors towards a sustainable environment. The examples given about POSCO and Esquel gave better understanding about the same.
The Session 6 was a business simulation where the groups have to work as a firm manufacturing shirts with various orders spilled over weeks and 3 types of shirts to be made with various criteria involved in making the same. The purpose of the simulation was to make us realise importance of cross function collaboration, what to produce, how much to produce and ways to improve performance, how to reduce setup time and invest in machine where set up time is less. Post simulation there was discussion on the article of “The Achilles Heels of SCM” which emphasised on the fact that there could be weak point even after looking into everything and this could be simply due to bad quality of data being worked upon. The article discussed about 5S approach:
Sort
Setting order
Shine
Standardise
Sustain
The article discussed how phantom stock outs can affect the company`s profitability by almost 25% and there is need of TQM, warehouse management.
The Session 7 was about dividing cost based on the activity being performed at the various types of stores the company operates to sell its beauty products. From the exercise it was clear that if we try to allocate the cost uniformly it will not lead to clear pictures and all the kind of stores showed similar contribution margin. However, when the costs were divided based on the activity which each kind of store performed there was lot of changes and the differences were evident in the performance of various stores. This analysis helped in understanding the various performance of stores and is easy for a manager to take decision regarding what kind of stores to continue and which one to shut down. The above analysis helped in understanding the importance of ERP and benchmarking in order to better