Saudi Dairy & Foodstuff Company Supply Chain Management
Introduction
The purpose of this report is to recommend a selected company
“Saudi Dairy & Foodstuff Company (SADAFCO)” to develop supply
chain considering collaborative planning forecasting and
replenishment (CPFR), green supply chain, vendor managed inventory
(VMI), free zones in the UAE, disaster management using supply
chain, cold chain logistics, third party logistics, cloud computing
applications in supply chain and so on.
However, this paper will concentrate on halal food supply chain, key
strategic tools, main elements of supply chain and the role of overall
supply chain, industry scan of the practice, internal strengths and
weaknesses, external threats and opportunities, PEST factors,
benchmarking and spider analysis for SADAFCO.
Supply Chain Practice of the Company Including Key Elements and
Role
Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR)
CPFR is one of the most useful business practices in which trading
partners apply information technology to upgrade supply chain
management system and to facilitate inter company coordination
along with to gain competitive advantages (Kim & Mahoney, 2006,
p.4).
According to the report of Hoppe (1999, p.38), this business model
was first implemented by the Benchmarking Partners of Wal-Mart in
1995, which enables trading partners to advance visibility into one
another’s critical actions and broaden cooperative arrangements to
combine their intelligence in the planning and fulfillment of consumer
demand and to standardize joint processes across companies.
However, Hoppe (1999, p.38) further added that CPFR model plays
vital role in industries where inventory comprises a major portion of
total logistics costs; therefore, manufacturers and retailers in the
consumer packaged products industry have excitedly responded to
CPFR though it is difficult to implement this model practically
because of it exists cultural challenges within organization and among
trading partners.
This model includes nine steps to collaborate three phases such as
planning, forecasting and executing; however, figure number one
shows CPFR model more elaborately –
Phase I – Planning
Edwards (2003, p.6) reported that first phase relates to people,
procedures, and developing of trust to remove cultural gap between
manufactures and partners by sharing vision and identifying
appropriate procedure to work together with the suppliers. However,
this phase includes two steps, such as –
Step 1– Development of the Front-end Agreement: This is one of the
most critical and time-consuming stages though it establishes
cooperative relationship between customers and suppliers;
nevertheless, content writer will play vital rule in order to develop this
model in the company.
However, if companies integrate CPFR, all the partners will be able to
access data and other information using portal and they will be able to
provide feedback, share views and sent documents to signing and
publishing agreement within short time and agreement will be binding
on both parties;
Step 2- Creating Joint Business Plan: Both parties of the contract may
share lots of information each other and many of such information are
too important to review present strategies and set up new business
plan. Therefore, the companies need to include some advanced
planning software, which gives the opportunity to share information
easily regarding quantities, lead times and capacity limitations and so
on;
Phase II – Forecasting
Edwards (2003, p.7) stated that CPFR model starts function with the
joint forecast of end-user demand and continues through all issues of
supply chain arrangement, ensuring support for both long-term and
day-to-day decisions; thus, the parties will be able to take prompt
decision regarding financial and operational issue and they further
able to know about sales forecast and order volume.
However, this process help the companies identify complexities in the
operational system and business environment;
Step 3- Create Sales Forecast: Manufactures and other retailers in the
consumer packaged products need to incorporate demand forecasting,
demand consensus, production and distribution planning software
because it is important step to set up promotional plan considering
historical data and sales forecast;
Steps 4 and 5 – Collaborating to Develop a Shared Forecast: In this
stage, the companies need to find out some special items that differ
more than a certain percentage and then system software and
communication tools give the chance to the all users to up-to-date
information at their ends;
Step 6- Forecasting Orders: Based on the output of previous step,
causal information, inventory strategies and the customers’ inventory
data, the manufacturers would develop a time-phased, item and actual
volume numbers, and allocate production capacity against demand.
However, this step is important for the following reasons –
The order forecast integrates the sales estimate with order
necessities to expand exact demand (Williams, 2010);
Software is breaking down production requirements on a daily
or even hourly basis to fill the essential order;
Immediate collaboration decreases the insecurity between
trading partners
Steps 7 and 8- Identifying and Resolving Exceptions: In first stage,
companies need to identify exceptions that fall outside the front-end
agreement. At the same time, all exceptions are resolved by immediate
communication between the partners, for instance, query shared data
and submit results to support the process;
Phase III – Executing
Execution of the CPFR model in the company is one of the major
difficult tasks; however, this process includes two steps, such as –
Step 9- Generating Orders: The last stage in the CPFR procedure is
generating the order, promising the delivery and maintaining positive
relationship with partners and customers by ensuring that the product
is ready when needed;
Step 10- Executing to the CPFR Plan: Though order generation is last
stage of the formal CPFR model, but it needs to concentrate on the
execution of the order.
Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI)
Kumar & Kumar (2003) stated that VMI is the process, which allows
the suppliers to create the purchase orders considering exact demand
while third party logistics provider can also observe inventory level in
order to mitigate the loophole of supply chain system; however, it has
both positive and negative effects on the business.
Disaster Management Using Supply Chain
The following flowchart shows the disaster management techniques in
the supply chain of SADAFCO. It outlines the ways in which this
company can quickly recover from any disasters at any levels of its
supply chain by means of back up resources.
It is possible for the company to get rid of any kind of hindrances by
means of strong back up facilities throughout the supply chain,
starting from disaster of the farmers at the food cultivation level, to
the failure of any equipment at the production plants.
Cold Chain Logistics
Global AgriSystem (2011) suggested that it is a logistic structure that
imparts a sequence of amenities for upholding perfect storage-space
environment for easily perishable goods from the starting-point to the
end-consumption level in food SCM; it should begin at the farm level
(harvest methods, pre-cooling, etc) and cover up to the consumer level
or at least to the retail level.
A regimented cold-chain lessens food-spoilage, maintains quality of
the products, and assures cost-efficient deliverance to the customer;
the key characteristic of the chain is that if any of the links is absent or
is fragile, the entire system stops working; in the dairy food industry
of United Arab Emirates, cold-chain infrastructure generally consists
pre-cooling-facilities, cold-storage, refrigerated-carriers, packaging,
warehousing, and information-management-systems.
The following flowchart shows the dairy cold chain infrastructure
adopted by most of the companies like SADAFCO in the dairy food
industry of United Arab Emirates:
As SADAFCO also offers products like juices and tomato ketchup, it
needs to focus on not just the dairy cold chain infrastructure, but also
on the cold chain infrastructure of agricultural products like fruits and
vegetables. The following flowchart shows the agricultural cold chain
infrastructure adopted by the company –
Cloud Computing Applications in Supply Chain
SADAFCO has not yet initiated cloud computing for its data storage
in supply chain; however, it is notable that cloud computing helps to
backing-up and restoring an overgrowing-database whilst ascertaining
high-level accessibility to global users, enhancing receptiveness
through trouble-free access towards cost-effectiveness, offering
technology stand for running resourcefully, and getting programmed
disaster-recovery sites as well as the location emancipation cloud.
As a result, like many large-organizations, the cost of supply chain
management remains one key factor for SADAFCO upon which it
takes decisions of formulating different cost reduction measures; on
the other hand, cloud computing is relatively cheap, elastic, and
ecologically sustainable solution that helps businesses to become agile
and much more flexible to external-influences.
It is essential to note that adoption of cloud computing enhances
businesses’ responsiveness; the speed at which new-computing
capacity could requisite remains a key-constituent of cloud
computing; adding additional-storage, network-bandwidth, memory,
and computing power, everything gains a fast pace; majority of cloud
providers adopt infrastructure-software, which could effortlessly
adjoin, shift, or modify an application with extremely small
interference by cloud-provider-workers.
Therefore, it is vital for SADAFCO to integrate a suitable cloud
computing technology in its supply chain management in near future.
Industry Scan of the Practice
Laeequddin (2009) stated that UAE has a presence of entrepreneurs
from more than hundred nations; Dubai Logistics City (DCL),
launched in 2008, possess 11 million square meters area and is part of
the 140 square kilometer Dubai World Central airport; moreover, the
government ascertained business rules and directives to supervise the
safety of the firms operating in the nation.
Dubai World Central airport possesses ability to deal with 120m
travelers and 12m tons of cargo annually and offers feature to manage
logistics industry from transportation to packaging and labeling of
commodities –this contributes vastly on growth of the supply chain
management of the businesses in UAE; it is notable that total spending
in UAE’s food industry has exceeded $1.76b.
Further details of industry and the scan of the practice are discussed in
the subsequent section of this paper.
Free Zones in UAE
Library of Congress (2007) mentioned that due to governmental
policy of law liberalization, the intensity of foreign investment in
UAE is growing in a remarkable rate as trading in “free trade zones”
gives foreign investors the chance of gaining benefits from freedom
from all sorts of duties; thus, the current policy of “free trade zones”
encourages foreign entry in UAE.
It has been evidenced that traditionally the country emphasized to
keep control over the foreign companies, although encouraging the
foreign companies with favorable investment environment, energy,
and infrastructural support for the rapid development of the UAE;
therefore, after turning a member of the WTO, it became essential for
UAE to declare some places as the “free zones”.
At the same time, the government also established free trade zones in
some areas like Dubai where the foreign companies are entitled to
own 95% of the ownership including controlling power, and so the
free trade zones have turned as an effective attraction for foreign
investment in UAE. This is one of the main reasons of why foreign
companies like SADAFCO find it convenient to carry out its
operations in places like Dubai.
Moreover, the foreign companies like SADAFCO are also enjoying
corporate tax holidays in UAE along with immunity of personal taxes
for the foreign entrepreneurs, while there are also opportunities of
duty free importations.
Global Office (2011) argued that there are both forms of FDI inflow
and outflow in UAE, but the attracting foreign trade zone has shaped
another more influential driver for the multinationals while the total
volume of FDI in free zones of UAE has reached at US dollar 73
billion.
Within last three decades, the export processing areas in the free trade
zones has turned out to be a heavenly place of investment where local
legislation do not encounter the multinationals to their restriction on
free business operation and the country has turned as the second FDI
attractive region in the world.
Green Supply Chain for SADAFCO
Hafez, Farag & Al-Sukayran (1993, p.1) pointed out that the present
situation of the dairy product industry of United Arab Emirates is
under serious threats due to the cattle infected by foot and mouth
diseases in most of the firms; owing to lack of vaccination, the diary
firms are going to encounter with a tremendous economic dissenter.
The raising health and environmental awareness among the people
have developed the issue as a national agenda in the GCC region for
the last few decades; and thus, recently, the center of attention of
consumers have prolonged to the wider extent for sustainability that
pressured the dairy firms to strengthen their measures to protect the
supply chain with health hazard.
Such shifting market scenario forced the global diary firms to
integrate green supply chain, while the company SADAFCO
essentially establishes its green supply chain to continue its growing
market position.
Sarkis (2003, p.3) defined the green supply chain management as a
business process that the modern organizations apply to mobilize their
raw materials and other supplies in cost effective manner without
degrading the environment including the human race; as there would
be some environmental hazards in the production process, the
companies would be aiming to reduce such risks.
The raising environmental conscious in the society and activist
nongovernmental organizations kept continuous pressure on the
business communities to integrate GSCM (Green Supply Chain
Management) to protecting the environment by increasing analysis
both academia and practitioner; thus, companies have to concentrate
just not to profit maximizing, but also need to care the nature.
For SADAFCO, GSCM decisions are a major issue that the
organization is striving for both in strong internal and external
association with a model of dynamic approach to its business along
with its affiliation to the environmental concerns, while the
management and decision framework would take into account of
multidimensional strategies to procure its raw materials and supplies.
At the base point, SADAFCO would take crash program to convince
the suppliers to vaccinate the cattle in their firms; meanwhile it would
investigate the production process of its other materials’ suppliers and
urge them for their environmental awareness.
Third Party Logistics or 3PL
Manatayev (2003, p.1) pointed out that the changing dynamics of the
logistics market has been aligned to the logistics outsourcing, which is
identified as the third party logistics or 3PL that function in the most
competitive market environment that shifted the logistics market
commodity status with high profit margin to lower profit.
For SADAFCO there are huge opportunities to integrate third party
logistics to reduce shipping and transportation cost and to use further
value added service matching with the increasing customers choice
and the aim to enjoy adequate profit and enhanced customer’s loyalty.
Halal Food Supply Chain
Blominvest Bank (2011, p.7) estimated that nearly 1.8 billion to 2
billion people are Muslim consumers in the world and it is one of the
most influential factors for the manufacturers, investors, farmers and
retailers of global market. However, Blominvest Bank (2011, p.7)
further reported that food supply chain has changed from national and
international level because of quick developments in technology and
transportation system.
Therefore, Muslim executives are expanding their business in global
market to maximize profits. According to the report of Blominvest
Bank, anticipated market size of halal food products is $640.0 billion
and the GCC countries are the largest importer of global halal
products particularly KSA and the UAE are the chief importer markets
(market size about $43.80 billion).
On the other hand, KSA is the largest food and beverages market in
GCC region; so, SADAFCO provides more attention on every stage
(production, procurement, processing, sale, and consumption) to deal
with foreign parties because this company is committed to ensure
100% halal products or produce lawful products according to the
Islamic law or Shariah.
According to the report of CPH World Media (2011), dairy production
in the GCC Countries has increased by 20 percent over the last three
years because of the development of supply chain management;
Therefore, SADAFCO has expanded business operation in the UAE
and boosted its annual profits; for example, total sales revenue of
SADAFCO was SR 1146 million in 2010. However, public awareness
about milk products and increase of consumption rates help the
company increase demand; however, SADAFCO needs to consider
following issues to ensure halal products –
Suppliers of raw materials will ensure that they follow
legitimate way of entire process;
Raw materials must not be stolen;
Production system will only consider Islamic law or Shariah;
Dairy products will not be harmful to public health.
Strategic Analysis
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
According to NCB (2005), the company’s key strength is its
ability to provide fresh foodstuffs right in the front of customers
ensuring the scrupulous freshness standard, unique
deliciousness, perfection, and superior fragrance.
It possesses an overall good supply chain through which it is
able to obtain constant fresh food supplies; it ensures good
relation with the suppliers and eventually, regular supply of raw
materials.
It provides absolutely hygienic and healthy product range,
which is essential for the customers of UAE.
Tetra Pak Company (2010) stated that the company has lowered
it operational-expenses by enhancing efficiency; moreover, the
company produces a wide range of products, including tomato
paste, juice, triangle-cheese, ice cream, cream jar cheese,
tomato ketchup, bottled water, chips, cream, basateen, and so
on.
The company is considered an idol for its quality; moreover,
because of the high superiority of its product mix, the customers
are highly satisfied with the quality, for instance, Favorite brand
Saudia UHT milk successfully captured 70 percent local market
share because of its outstanding quality in terms of solidity and
nutrients.
Due to its quality, price, and marketing policy, the company is
rapidly growing both in home and abroad.
The business maintains its corporate governance with high
degree of compliance with the general norms of the corporate
practice of United Arab Emirates and pay attention to the local
legislation.
The company has a significant level of budgetary involvement
for its corporate social responsibility policy and practice.
The strong base of loyal customers has turned as competitive
force for the company and the existing customer base is
gradually increasing as well.
This business is continuing its journey with remarkable
footprint in the market with its long experience starting from
1976.
Weaknesses
Price of raw materials:JThe customers are dissatisfied due to
high price of milk powder and tomato paste in global market,
but the company is not responsible for price increase since
unstable price of raw materials influence the company to
increase price of these products.
Supply of milk:JAccording to Global Research (2009), the
management team of the company addressed that the supply of
milk could be one of the main weaknesses for this company
because it has no cattle stock or home based raw milk
production.
Opportunities
Market leadership:Jit has enough financial capabilities to
expand its market outside the GCC market with more products
and to be the market leader within the target period.
Market share:Jat the same time, it can capture a significant part
of the global market share by changing the existing strategies
and using the capital more efficiently.
Cross- cultural centre:Jalthough it is a Saudi Arabian
company, it has great opportunity to increase its brand image in
global market by giving special facilities to the expatriates;
however, in United Arab Emirates, the performance of this
company it quite impressive in terms of cultures.
Demand:JFood & Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported
that the demand for packaged dairy products are increasing
gradually because of the fact that the people around the globe
are becoming more and more conscious about the health
benefits of such foods. This creates a very essential opportunity
for the company to observe the augmentation in the sales and
revenue from this market.
Easy to enter:JMost of the countries of the world are now
members of the WTO, which gives the opportunity to enter new
market easily by applying any entry mode strategies
Joint Venture:JAs the company has a brand awareness in GCC
countries for its products, it can expand the market in European,
American, and South Asian countries by applying joint venture
strategies.
Diversification:JAccording to the report of Global research, the
corporation is a highly diversified company and it diversified its
products vertically, therefore, it has the opportunity to develop
the financial position by focusing on a few business segments.
Threats
Competitors: The existence of strong competitors in national
and international markets is one of the main threats for the
company because sometimes the competitors offer lower price
for similar products and use more effective strategies.
Any possible political unrests in UAE can hamper it operations.
Mad Cow disease or veterinary: the production system of the
company may hamper due to the risk of animal diseases like
mad cow; nowadays, the customers became health conscious
and they stop to purchase milk products if they know about
these diseases, and the affects of this on revenues will be wide
spreading;
Production per Cow: production of milk per cow is decreasing
owing to increasing number of old cows, which may create
hindrance of production system in near future in United Arab
Emirates.
Merger: merger with foreign companies may destroy the
originality of the product line of the company; as a result, it
could loss market share because of decreasing sales; for
instance, merger with Danish companies was the main cause of
market fall of this company.
Legal issues: frequent changes of regulation may increase the
cost for legal claims and increase costs in this sector as well.
PEST Analysis
Political Factor
Political factors can have a great influence over the operations of the
company. If the operations of the company in UAE confront any
political unrests like those occurring in Bahrain, Syria, or Egypt, then
its revenue from the UAE market will fall down.
In order to ensure that the unrests in Middle East do not cause any
adverse impact over its financial performance, the company needs to
diversify in the markets of new countries so that the revenues remain
stable under any circumstances.
Economic Factor
The financial strength of the company demonstrates its success while
the recessionary economy has no greater impact on the company; as a
result, the share price of the company has increased within a short
period though it fell severely in 2008; however, the figure below
shows the stock performance of the company:
Social Factor
Although the company is a Saudi Arabian company, the fact that both
Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are Muslim countries and are
very much conservative in terms of social behavior means that the
company do not face a great deal of problem in matching up with its
social and cultural issues.
Nevertheless, it is important to state that the company is a very ethical
business and it maintains great hygiene throughout the production
process (SADAFCO, 2010). This is highly important because the
consumers of UAE are highly conscious with “Halal food”.
Technological Factor
The company is upgrading itself technologically in order to better
compete with the global competitors. Consequently, it has developed
its own website, and is trying to include IT amenities in its daily
operations.
It has planned to allocate more budgets next year for integrating
further advanced IT infrastructures in order to better control its supply
chain. In addition, this is one of the most significant factors for the
company as the foodstuffs and milk products need proper
preservation.
Additionally, integration of new technologies helps the company to
boost the productivity and maintain the temperatures and humidity of
the production place, while the weather of the United Arab Emirates is
not so suitable for dairy food products.
Therefore, the company also planned to employ a highly expert team
of researchers on the research and development department in order to
find out the best technologies that can suit to preserve the dairy
product for a long time and ensure the freshness.
Benchmarking
Numerous businesses use benchmarking to initiate transformations by
checking competitive companies’ achievements and discovering the
probable plans for innovation; moreover, it compares how companies
manage product-development processes (Amaral & Sousa, 2009;
Anand & Kodali, 2008; Carpinetti & Melo, 2002; Dattakumar &
Jagadeesh, 2003; Tidd, Bessant, & Pavitt, 2005; Hinton, Francis, &
Holloway, 2000; Sweeney, 1994; and Wong & Wong, 2008).
Although such business practices are moderately new in the industries
of United Arab Emirates, as a globally recognized business,
SADAFCO always strives to reach the highest benchmarks in the
industry; it is committed to assure best standards of quality in its
production procedures and has achieved International Standards
Organization (ISO) certification in some of its plants. NCB (2005)
stated that the company has fixed its SMART objectives to integrate
an excellent benchmarking standard by the next five years so that it
can obtain ISO certification in each of its plants.
Spider Analysis
The following diagram illustrates the spider analysis of the company,
evaluated on the foundation of benchmarks, strength of distribution
network, cold chain logistics, halal food supply, stock prices, and
goodwill:
The above spider analysis is based on the following magnitude:
As marked in the above figure, the company’s performance is at
acceptable level in case of benchmarks and distribution network, first-
rated in terms of cold chain logistics, and pre-eminent in terms of
halal food supply, stock prices, and goodwill.
Managerial Implications and Recommendations
Because of certain flaws in communications of the supply chain, it
becomes extremely tough for the company to manage everything in a
cost effective way and to lower down the production expenditure.
This, in turn, results in lack of economies of scale, and increases price
of the products.
The consumers in the industry possess high bargaining power because
of the presence of a large number of competitive firms, so they do not
show any interest to buy highly priced products. Because of all these
reasons, it is viable for the business to incorporate cloud computing to
managing its supply chain. Incorporation of cloud computing would
provide the firm with a range of benefits.
For example, cloud-computing is elastic; it can enlarge /abridge
mechanically and offer resources on-demand for numerous archetypal
magnitudes as well as servers, storage and networking, which
SADAFCO requires; on-demand feature of cloud computing means
that as demand increases/decreases, the capability could much
effortlessly correspond the demand; in addition, there is no need to
over provision for the peaks.
At the software level, it would endorse SADAFCO’s developers and
IT-operations to expand, organize, and function rapidly without
collapsing, devoid of thinking about the position or infrastructure;
moreover it can also provide minor agencies or working partners of
SADAFCO with trouble-free access to a cost effective, flexible
technology podium for functioning efficiently in terms of applications
capacity and scalability.
Therefore, SADAFCO is recommended to implement hybrid cloud
computing for data storage.
This will give SADAFCO a chance to make use of both public and
private cloud at the same time and get the benefits of both sharing data
with the communities and stakeholders and managing them efficiently
within the firm – this would lower the costs of sharing information
externally and internally.
It is very much important for SADAFCO to make sure that its data
storage costs remain much lower even after sharing them with all the
communities of its operations where people would come to know
more about SADAFCO in order to participate in the organization’s
programs.
It would also assist SADAFCO to achieve its aim of ensuring cost
efficiency in different channels of distribution. SADAFCO is further
recommended to select the hybrid cloud provider carefully, as it is
obligatory for the providers to be highly flexible in order to make sure
that the system can be updated any time at request. They should be
efficient enough to ensure cyber security and capable to recover
quickly from potential hacking.
Another important recommendation would be to conduct thorough
research for assessing the risks involved with hybrid cloud before
uploading important data online. It would be feasible for SADAFCO
to evaluate that apart from financial risks, what other probable
troubles may arise due to such IT integration.
Conclusion
From the study of the supply chain practice of the corporation, it is
notable that although the company possesses a quite organized
distribution channel, it is not exceptionally cost effective. Any
interruptions at any stages of the channel may cause delay and
increase costs of transportation; so, it is highly imperative for the
business to manage the supply chain more efficiently.
Therefore, for being more efficient, the integration of latest IT
infrastructure in the system is recommended. Moreover, the company
should further focus on developing its CPFR.
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