Supply Chain Management Home Depot
Home Depot adopted a management tool in 2012. Th essay reports on its success.
In 2012, the Company turned to a workforce management tool in order to alleviate their labor-intensive scheduling. What this meant in essence was that the company, employing close to 300,000 workers had a daunting task in organizing and delegating tasks for these workers as well as monitoring quality completion of these tasks. The original forecasting and scheduling system was built on a 1990 model, and Chris Duffey, VP of operations and strategy at HD was intent on remodeling it. The system had become onerous and wasteful with too many people employed in planning and supervising it. HD had gone through this recession intent on reducing coasts and downsizing wherever possible. This was one archaic system that certainly needed some lean management tools. Secondly, the manual scheduling process was also expensive and thirdly, managers failed to improve the work schedule from eh customer's perspective leaving many gaps and much chaos in the system.
Success of teh system can be seen in that in At the start of 2013, the company employed 189,390 employees. Its latest news has been that due to its booming business, it plans to employ 80,000 more associates for its predicted busy Spring season (Home Depot (2013) News Releases.). HD apparently has its system back on track and has managed to not only tidy their concerns but to also improve them and win over customers by so doing. Their ERP system has been boosting to their business.
Qualitative analysis in business research and methodology
type of probability? If so, describe the different types of probability.
One uses probability mathematics in order to assess the probability of a particular occurrence or the results of a particular action; For instance, whether or not one should go into a certain market or invest in a certain product – what are the chances or possibilities of the product succeeding.
There are five major approaches of assigning probability: Classical Approach, Relative Frequency Approach, Subjective Approach, Anchoring, and the Delphi Technique
Amazon.com a Strategic Assessment of Amazons\' E-Strategies
Amazon's remarkable ascent as one of the top online global retailers can be attributed to the foresight they had in creating a comprehensive distributed order management, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and e-commerce series of systems. The many other e-commerce sites that rose quickly with massive infusions of venture capital just as quick exited the market, flaming out due to a lack of system and process scalability, lack of understanding of customer dynamics, and a complete loss of focus on scalable business models. All of these factors are what caused competitors to Amazon to exit the e-commerce market either through acquisition, merger or complete exist from the market.
When starting Amazon, Jeff Bezos invested heavily in the distributed order management, ERP, SCM and e-commerce integration points to book distributors initially, and then expanded into a broader product mix. This allowed the enterprise to quickly scale as volumes increased during the first five years of the company's existence. Having creating this reliable, scalable and secure platform, Mr. Bezos and the Amazon founders concentrated on creating an analytics layer throughout their architecture that could quantify customer, distributor, dealer and even competitor activity on the site (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). This reliance on analytics also gave Amazon executives and technical staff the insight they needed to launch quickly into entirely new product categories, get the complex and often confusing task of localization right, and also create a highly popular and profitable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform and hosting platform for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications (Mitchell, 2012).
From a technology standpoint the performance of Amazon today can be directly attributed to the insightful decisions made in 1994 and 1995 when the company founders prioritized the development of enterprise-wide platforms and a strong focus on analytics over spending all their time on the front-end website and its façade (Lindic, Bavdaz, Kovacic, 2012). As Jeff Bezos would later remark in interviews, by investing to create a truly world-class enterprise back-end system first, his company was freed up to fast track the actual user interface of the e-commerce sites globally at a pace that left comp[editors far behind in terms of functionality and product breadth (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). Mr. Bezos chose in 2007 to also institute a culture of metrics that also capitalized on the nearly two decades of investment in their infrastructure (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). Combining the global e-commerce, enterprise-tested infrastructure and the most robust set of analytics that any e-commerce provider had, Amazon was ready to begin expanding their product strategies, start offering greater options in their Amazon Web Services initiative which today is expected to be a $1B by 2015, even by conservative forecasts (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012) and also invest heavily in their state-of-the-art recommendation engine technology that seeks out products and services customers may be interested in and present them during shop[ping sessions in real-time (Sun, 2012). It's important to appreciate just how vast of an e-commerce infrastructure Amazon has in completing this analysis of their e-strategy. They have greater agility, flexibility and capability to execute than any other online retailer globally today. How they choose to use these technologies to attract new customers and keep existing ones loyal, a point the case study makes in greater detail, is predicated on the ability to get the most value from this infrastructure while still staying focused on delivering a world-class customer experience in each transaction. Based on the analysis undertaken for this case analysis, it is abundantly clear that Jeff Bezos and the executive management team are passionate about keeping the company as customer-focused as possible, including the continual selective use of technology to accentuate and strengthen the user experience online and off (Murphy, Narkiewicz, 2010). With these foundational aspects of Amazon defined, the seven areas of focus in this analysis are next presented.
The overarching objective of this analysis is to understand the value of e-strategies in organizations, with Amazon being the organization of interest in the analysis. Specifically concentrating on the benefits of having an e-strategy at Amazon, defining how e-strategies contribute to Amazon's broader accomplishments, and an analysis of how Amazon aligns their e-strategy to the overarching organizational strategy as well., The analysis continues with an analysis of the key business factors that are the catalysts of the e-strategy at Amazon, followed by a suggested strategic plan for ensuring e-strategy initiatives at the company continue to lead to profitable growth. The final section of this analysis provides an assessment of the technical infrastructure needed to accomplish the proposed strategic plan.
As Amazon has continually evolved its position as a global force in online retailing, its command of supply chains globally has also evolved very quickly. In the latest rankings of the highest-performing supply chains completed by Gartner, a leading research consultancy, Amazon has ranking within the top twenty five for five years running (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). What this signals is that Amazon has progressed from relying on enterprise-wide infrastructure to compete and is now on the growth trajectory of making supply chain processes their competitive advantage.
Complex information technology ERP systems deployment across enterprise organizations
There is commercial software packages called enterprise resource planning aimed at integrating different types of data and information that flows through the company. The information includes financial and accounting data, data related to human resource, data related to supply chain and data about customers. ERP systems are a great solution for the problem of business integration for managers struggling since long with nonconforming information systems conflicting operating practices, thus has become a readymade resolution for business integration problem (Davenport, 1998). The current essay is a discussion on the role of vendors in ERP implementation. Based on the review of the research on ERP implementation, the author has tried to answer the question as what vendors seem to know and not know about implementing ERP systems. And how much influence should vendors have in an organization's ERP decision?"
IT professional roles and support resources in organizations
The more complex the software, product or service, the more critical a role initial customer service and support teams play in ensuring customers' expectations are met and their experiences are positive. In the enterprise software industry this especially holds true, as companies will often invest tens of millions of dollars in new enterprise software to track progress of their goals, orchestrate new product development and efficiently run manufacturing. This is admittedly one of the most stressing areas of IT help desk operations as the users of these systems are often under extreme time pressure to get work done involving these complex enterprise IT systems and applications (McCormack, 2006). There are techniques for ensuring a very high level of customer satisfaction however, and three of these best practices are described in this analysis.
Importance of the Alcan Case
Alcan's continued revenue growth is the result of the combined success of increasing sales in four main business units, in addition to growth through acquisition. The cumulative effects of these two factors have served to create a profitable business and one where a highly decentralized organizational structure dominates (Chang, Wang, 2011). The catalyst of the organization becoming so decentralized is the continued revenue gains made across four businesses, each competing in market areas that face heavy pricing and commodity-like market conditions. Despite the heavily process-centric based approaches the industry takes to supply chain management, production and distribution, Alcan has been also able to profitably grow sales in the more mature markets they compete in. The senior management and IT departments credit the highly decentralized nature of the enterprise-wide systems that run the company.
During the time period of the case, Alcan generated $23.6B in sales in 2006, and has 68,000 employees throughout its global operations that span 61 countries. The four major groups include Primary Metal, Engineered Products, Packaging and Bauxite & Alumina. Each of these business groups have their own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and IT infrastructure. They each also have their own maintenance contracts with enterprise software vendors including SAP who the company pays approximately $100M a year in maintenance fees to. There are also the costs of operating over 400 different pricing systems, many of which duplicate functions across divisions as well. The new CIO of the company, Robert Ouellette, enters into a challenging situation and one that will require a completely different IT and organizational structure to succeed.
Organizational Environment
The Alcan organizational environment is highly decentralized to the point of there being four separate companies in the same corporation, each with its own entire value chain and supporting functions. As with the value chain concept, each of the four divisions has created its own main and supporting functions, and no two business units or divisions are the same. From the initial supply chain management and supplier quality management processes and systems to the supplier qualification, new product development, production and fulfillment including logistics, each business unit is significantly different than the other. When information systems and processes become unique to a given organizational business unit or division, the information and intelligence shared redefines the identity and over time, the core competencies of a business unit (Boh, Yellin, 2007). This is exactly what's happening in the four business units of Alcan during the time period of the case study.
The Primary Metal, Engineered Products, Packaging and Bauxite & Alumina have in effect become their own companies, each with its own ERP, Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and myriad of pricing and distribution systems. The case states that there are over 400 different pricing systems in place across the four business units or divisions. CIO Robert Ouellette and other senior executives see the potential for consolidating all systems together and creating a centralized IT architecture. Creating a highly centralized IT architecture and framework would require the fundamental structure of the company to change significantly. It would also require an entirely new IT architecture, followed by redefinition of processes, systems and procedures throughout the company. As the information platforms or technologies of a business define not only the performance of divisions but the structure and performance of business models over time, Robert Ouellette and his staff must think strategically as to how they will modify the overall organizational structure.