Supply Chain Management

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The case study involves some top supply chain disasters by singling out every company’s issues regarding supply chain. Looking at Boeing, their new outsourced supply chain could not deliver components for the new Dreamliner 787 aircraft, which led to a two-year delay in product launch. There were almost $2 billion that were incurred to support the component supplies. Revenues were lost due to cancellation of orders.

Apple was overwhelmed by the demand for new Power Macs, which they could not deliver after their decision to use the conservative inventory strategy. It was unfortunate that the failure for delivering the goods made Apple to lose PC market share.

Loblaws attempted to restructure her supply chain by affecting their logistics network redesign program, which implied that they wanted to do more than they could with inadequate plan. There were consecutive poor financial quarters that followed including the stock price took big hit.

Foxmeyer Drug introduced new order management as well as distribution systems that did not work.

Robert Smith of GM invested billions of dollars in non-functional robot technology that largely reduced sales.

WebVan increased their investment in the automated warehouses which consumed too much of their capital without ascertaining the demand. The company eventually goes bankrupt within a short period.

Inventory management was a major issue after attempts to implement the new warehouse system prompting the company to under-ship and lose market share.

Denver Airport bought a baggage handling system that did not work causing a number of challenges including PR issues.

Quality of offshore toys in China turned out to be inferior forcing a number of goods made in China be recalled and this greatly damaged Mattel’s brand and lowered stock prices.

Toys R US.com could not deliver to their customers as they had earlier promised due to poor inventory management procedures that prohibited them from supplying goods on time. Instead, they just sent apologies to their customers who felt much more dissatisfied.

Hershey’s Halloween wanted to transform the company’s IT infrastructure and supply chain but the project slipped due to poor implementation strategy. Hershey Food missed many clients’ orders and shipments hence leading to lose in revenue and stock.

Cisco experienced poor inventory management strategy, which made them pile excessive inventory due to lower demand. Cisco was not sensitive enough to the slowing demand and this forced them to write down inventory worth $2.2 billion.

Nike experienced serious challenges of predicting demand and deploying factory by creating vital inventory shortages and excesses because of the new but complex supply chain planning system they wanted to implement.

Walmart has continuously been involved with RFID issue which has not achieved its intended purpose after it was rolled out. It is unfortunate that after Wal-Mart introduced the RFID, the retail company as well as other key players in the system have not seen its benefits. It may be argued therefore that the introduction of the system was just a poor decision making that was done by the management.

Aris Isotoner was faced by high cost of production as well as poor quality products when their Division of Sara Lee moved production from Manila, which already characterised with low cost production to even lower cost regions in Asia. Aris Isotoner experienced a serious drop in sales and begun making losses.

The largest automobile companies, Ford, GM and Chrysler’s plans for a massive trading exchange Covisint as well as a parallel e-procurement effort failed forcing the big three to lose millions of dollars.