Evergreen Products Case
1.1 Evergreen’s desired outcomes are to improve customer satisfaction by delivering its orders on time, reduce inventories, reduce employee overtime expense and determine if the shop floor manager should be replaced. The company needs to improve its demand planning responsiveness to better serve customer needs. By improving its process and capabilities as they relate to orders, the desired results will be realized.
1.2 Evergreen should try to improve its order entry system by eliminating/reducing constraints to so that the end accomplishment is a faster delivery time to the customer.
1.3 We know that the order entry system is working poorly because the cycle time exceeds the customer timeline, but
…show more content…
The process is riddled with wait time and defects – two of the “Seven Deadly Sins.” Many of the orders languish in certain parts of the company and are filled out erroneously within a non-digitized system.
Process measures are crucial to the processes success, and this system is only using a casual set of metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of its operations process for filling orders. The time it takes for the order to move from one process to the next should be definite – not an estimate, which describes Evergreen’s current process. Additionally, there are no metrics in place for process improvement. The order process is a serial/sequential. The company could improve by paralleling the order after it clears the Sales Account Manager by sending the order to accounting and to the shop simultaneously. A manager should improve the overall process by combining smaller processes, eliminating waste and rethinking the sequence.
2. The customers want their orders to be delivered on time. The existing customers pose a problem for Evergreen because their business spikes around certain holiday, thus increasing orders during certain times of the year. Evergreen needs to have another process in place for peak times versus the normal business schedule. The peak process could include such contingencies as having additional clerks on staff, mandating
The ordering process begins with the decision of the customer to submit their order simply by either calling, faxing or mailing their order information. When a customer calls in their order, the customer service representatives takes down pertinent customer information, which includes the customer's name, billing and shipping address, product number and description, quantity and shipping instructions. While taking down the order, the customer service representative access the company's order entry system where inventory checks are conducted as well as credit checks are processed. In addition, delivery options are advised to the customer. Here the customer decides
If the operation have not reordered all the goods they need, this can lead to irritated customers and lower revenue for the operation.
These processes are not performed in isolation. The end result relies heavily on the satisfactory completion of all processes and the communication of all functional areas involved. By viewing these processes as a whole, management can identify process inefficiencies. These inefficiencies may include delays or queuing at process bottlenecks, lack of control or checking, or places responsibility for process activities is not clear.
3. How can supply chain design and integration help John Wolf reduce investment and space requirements while maintaining adequate service levels?
Successful organizations continuously strive to improve the processes they have in place. Process improvement leads to better quality control, higher efficiencies and lower costs. In order to implement a process improvement plan, it is necessary to collect and analyze data from the process. In this paper, I present an analysis of the metric data collected for the process I identified during week #1. As part of the analysis, the control and confidence limits are calculated, as well as other relevant statistics. With this information, a process improvement
I previously worked for alongside the Department of New South Wales Health, whose mandate is to provide procurement information services to other Commonwealth and medical device agencies. My customer contact comes primarily via phone, but I also spend approximately 50% of my time meeting with customers face-to-face to provide training or more comprehensive advice that isn’t as effectively delivered over the phone. My customer contact is high volume and the Department’s charter stipulates strict turnaround times between 24 to 48 hours that are documented and measured.
The management team at Stone Computers hold weekly operational meetings to inform the operations team of the importance of maintaining the key objectives shown above in table 2, in this meeting we discuss what our current key performance indicators (KPI) are and how we can improve these to meet the customer and the stakeholder’s requirements. We set daily targets for the production line to try and meet the demand of the service level of agreement. As a progress controller I analyse the orders and prioritise the sequence in which they go down into production to be processed to try and keep our target greater 90% KPI.
I began my analysis by running a base case to determine the current flaws. I found that the wait times at Register AR and Financials and Verify Bills were high, meaning there are a lot of orders waiting in the queue ready to be processed. To shorten these times, I decided to shorten the working duration of these two processes, seen in case 2. This change would decrease the wait times at both processes, so orders will be processed at a quicker rate and more orders can be processed.
Finally, the current ordering process practiced is time consuming and cost money to the company and profits suffer due to this. The time and money can be saved by implementing the use of software in the best possible way. By doing so, the annual labor cost can be dropped from $ 926.00 to $ 240.50 and the average time to place an order can be dropped from 2 hours to 30 minutes. The significant difference in terms of cost and time after process improvement will help keep the low-cost operations in
The order management system represents the principal means by which buyers and sellers communicate information relating to individual orders of product. According to the customer survey cited in the case, it appears the order process is the biggest
The Order to Delivery (OTD) process as envisioned by the Ford 2000 initiative is intended to reduce the production time to 15 days. This is hindered by bottlenecks throughout the Ford supply chain. Ford desires to be able to forecast customer demand from dealers and keep at least 15 days of vehicles in each assembly plant’s order bank. Ford would also like to utilize mixing centers to optimize scheduling and delivery. Finally, there is a need for an order amendment process for minor customizations during the production process.
Excellent customer service is a way to set the organization apart from its competitors. Differentiation can be achieved through fast and correct execution of product ordering. To improve on the order process it is important to have the correct information provided in a timely fashion to all divisions. For integration to be successful information must be available throughout the entire supply chain.
Amazon.com Incorporated is company whose retail business is done exclusively online, formally known as electronic commerce or e-commerce. It was the book category that first caught the attention of founder Jeff Bezos, who realized that a Web store could offer more book inventory than an actual shop could offer (Cuneo, 2000). The idea was born and Amazon, a customer-centric company was created. Customer-centric is an approach that allows businesses to drive profits and gain competitive advantage by providing a positive customer experience not only at the point of sale, but also, after the sale (What is customer-centric, n.d.).
3. Highly refines supply chain that can cater to high demand of orders: The efficient coordination of the suppliers of
There are different ways through which a performance of a system can be assessed (order fill rate, production condition, accurate documentation among the most important), and the measure used by ALP seems to have some deficiencies in assessing the real impact of the operations undergone by the company and the final customer satisfaction. In fact can be said that such a measure doesn’t take in to consideration returned items, and considered the logistic process concluded in the moment in which the freight leaves the stocking point, in this way lacking an overall view of the process that can be seen as an old view of the logistic system. If customer service is defined as “the entire process of filling customer’s order […] handling the possible return of the goods” the current measurement system adopted by ALP is leaving out all the post-transaction elements which are vital to establish a good relationship with the customer and have to be planned for in advance. This is also one of the reasons why the service level is so strongly affected by stock availability. Focusing on the end-user side could give a more realistic picture of the performance of the company at a logistic level.