Unit 7

Introduction

Last unit Kibby and Strand faced a quality issue right before the  Christmas season and this got the attention of the CEO and senior  leadership. The company has done well using its current models for  forecasting supply of raw materials and demand for its products, but  when marketing starting shortening delivery time to appease customers it  created the circumstances that led to quality issues. 

The shorting of  delivery times also impacted the flow of cotton and wool from your  suppliers. There were days when the receiving department was getting  overwhelmed with suppliers delivering cotton and wool, so much so that  their trucks were stacked up waiting to unload and this prevented your  own deliver trucks from getting to the loading dock to ship products to  customers. Basically, shifting the delivery days up had a domino effect  on receiving, production, and shipping.  Who would have though one small  change in demand would result in all these issues?

Kibby and Strand poses the perfect scenario for a supply chain  management analysis. Supply chains are the lifeblood of organizations  like Kibby and Strand. The operations manager uses supply chain  management to do the following:

1. Manage procurement of raw materials.
2. Manage suppliers.
3. Manage customer demand.
4. Determine if outsourcing is beneficial or needed.
5. Identify problem in the supply chain and respond quickly

Refer back to Module 2, Managing Suppliers (Scenario) in  Practice Operations. Based on their observations in this scenario, and  upon a careful review of the available literature, the student is to  consider him or herself to be the Operations Manager of Kibby and  Strand, the company in the scenario, responsible for managing all three  departments: receiving, production, and shipping.

Conduct  an analysis of the way Kibby and Strand manages receiving, production,  and shipping and prepare a supply chain management plan to include a  checklist for the receiving department to use when ordering, receiving,  and staging raw materials.

The students are to create their plan based on knowledge learned in researching the topic, and post it in the discussion. 

Instruction Guidance: It would be prudent to  consider content covered in chapters 15 and 16 of the textbook; however,  there are many other useful resources available on the Internet and in  the literature to support the construction of your memo. 

The plan should be prepared as a Microsoft™ Word document, and then  attached to the unit discussion thread. There is no minimum or maximum  in terms of the word count; however, the response should explicitly  address all required components of this discussion assignment. The  document should be prepared consistent with the APA writing style (6th edition) and reflect higher level cognitive processing (analysis, synthesis and or evaluation).