Supply Chain Analyst with the ACME Corporation

Supply Project

Your company: You are a new Supply Chain Analyst with the ACME Corporation. We design specialty electronics that are components in larger finished goods such as major appliances, automobiles and industrial equipment. Manufacturing is outsourced to low-cost suppliers due to the significant labor contribution and closeness to electronic component suppliers.

Your product: ACME Corp. designs a leading-edge family of devices branded as “Voice Assistants.” These are add-on boxes that many OEMs are using as plug-and-play devices in a wide variety of Internet-of-Things products. They are also sold directly to consumers as after-market items, but only for IoT devices that were built with our proprietary data-port.

Figure 1: Product line of ACME Corp Voice Assistant IoT Add-on Boxes

Your task: Your Chief Supply Chain Officer (CSCO) is requesting a review of supplier-to-customer processes as related to recent growth in our company and increasing demand for faster responsiveness to customers. One alternative is to decentralize our inventory into regional Distribution Centers; however, our ERP system is currently limited in the data available to make some of these decisions – and the output reports are very antiquated. Starting off the process, the CSCO directed that your Analysis Team use population data to pro-rate our national sales data as a starting point. For this analysis, you are asked to focus only on the flagship product, Voice Assistant IoT Add-on Box, 4GB, SKU #123-456789. The challenge is now yours to complete some computations and interpret the results!

Your data: A detailed report from your ERP system along with secondary data from the U.S. Census Bureau (reference: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/data/data-sets.html) is provided. (Note: Sales to Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico are handled by a 3PL provider and therefore are NOT part of this analysis.) The consolidated EXCEL® file has incorporated several tasks already performed by the Analysis Team --- sort, cleanse, inventory optimization, etc. Other tasks remain for your team.

Detailed Requirements: Prepare a formal report summarizing your results and providing recommendations that are supported by facts. The required layout follows:

A. Supply Chain Management:

a. Identify a single key supplier and a single key customer for your product, including a brief description of their product.

b. Identify the proper type of business relationship that your company should have with the supplier and customer from Part A, above, then briefly describe the data that you would share with them.

c. When implementing Supply Chain Management with your #1 key supplier for the first time, create a timeline that lists each of the six SCOR processes in the order that you recommend implementation; include process leader (by job title), primary contact at supplier/customer (by job title), and duration to implement.

d. Briefly describe each of the four enablers of supply chain management, and for each, recommend a single technology enhancement for your company to implement in the near future.