Faculty Template

Supply Chain Management Strategies -- CRS Inc.
CRS is among the world's leading biotech companies, with multiple products in the market for serious or life-threatening medical conditions and over 50 projects in the pipeline. CRS Inc. has three business segments: Biotechnology, Animal Health and Consumer HealthCare. Its products are available in more than 150 countries. In order to leverage its size, the Product Manufacturing and Division (PMD), a division of CRS, handles global manufacturing and distribution for all three product divisions.
Don Davis, Director of Distribution for US and Canada, paced up and down in his office. He kept glancing at the current month’s inventory level summary report that was forwarded to him that morning by his Inventory Manager, Brad Lewinski. The dollar value of all the inventory is more than seven times the average monthly demand. Overall, 95.5% of retail orders can be fulfilled immediately upon request The closer he looked at the report, the more convinced he became that something needs to be done to improve the inventory situation of Consumer products, but exactly what, he has no idea.

　

ImportHome LLC -- A B2C Small Business Model

Jack Chen is the owner of a B2C e-Business company named ImportHome LLC. He imports Kitchen products from China and sells to the markets of North America and West Europe. At December 27^th, 2008, Jack is looking at his just arrived products of a full container in his garage which was ordered 3 months ago based on his forecast for the holiday season. The sales in this holiday season are much slower than expected. He wonders how he could sell these products in the coming year of economic downturn. Jack is also wondering if there is any way to avoid such a situation in the first place.

　

Yaka Pharmaceuticals -- Drug Distribution Contracts

Yaka Pharmaceuticals, a large North American pharmaceutical manufacturing company, is facing four distribution options. The first option is the buy-and-hold contract, which was used by Yaka Pharmaceuticals and their distributors up until 2004. They moved away from this contract at that time as the government issued a new law – the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, restricting the channel-stuffing accounting practice and distributor’s investment buying. Since then the Fee-for-Service (FFS) contract, initiated by the Big-Three distributors– AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson – has been the contract that is in place. Under the FFS contract, Yaka pharmaceuticals pays a fee to the distributors for their distribution services while everything else remains more or less the same as under the buy-and-hold contract. Executives at Yaka Pharmaceuticals are not happy with the additional fee for almost the same service they previously received free of charge. The third option is to work with 3^rd party logistics service providers on distribution. Although it looks promising, Yaka may be traveling down uncharted waters as the 3^rd party logistics providers are just emerging in the pharmaceutical industry and have yet to be widely accepted. Finally, a consulting company suggested the Fee-for-Distribution contract, which allows Yaka pharmaceuticals to work with existing distributors but under a different relationship which resembles that of a third party logistics contract. Gregg Cullen, the Vice President of sales and distribution at Yaka Pharmaceuticals, must select the distribution strategy that is the best for the company.

　

Panda Express -- Material Management
Nine o’clock at a Monday morning in March, Lily walked into the Panda Express restaurant located at Newport Center Mall in New Jersey and turned on her computer. Every Tuesday, Panda Restaurant Group corporate office sends out a Panda Food Model Report to each store. The report quantified the weekly variance between the standard usage and actual usage at the food/commodity item level according to dish recipes. Lily was anxious to read this report to find out how efficiently her store had managed its food items last week, and identify potential areas for improvement. The weekly report showed each store’s top five over and under used food items compared to its standard. She found that while the chicken breast bites were overused by more than 327%, chicken meat dark was underused by 59%. “Where could we be wrong in our food handling process?” Lily asked herself while she went through the report. A mismatch between the computer records and the actual usage indicates unobserved waste and poor material management as the reorder quantities are based on computer records.

Lily, the General Manager of this Panda Express store, had earlier managed a Panda Express store on the west coast for 18 months which had comparable annual sales. This was her second week here, and she was still getting to know her new associates and their working process.

　

Distribution Network Design -- Coach Inc.
Despite earning a good reputation for the quality of its products, Coach is facing an issue of long shipping time and high shipping cost to retail stores in the US. Up to 2008, Coach served the entire US market by one distribution center (DC), located in Jacksonville, Florida. The management was convinced that something needed to be done to reduce the shipping time and cost, and to improve service to retail stores. For this purpose, the management has committed $10 million to expand the current distribution network by adding new DCs. The question is: How many new DCs are needed and where to locate them so as to best utilize the committed resources?

　

Construction Resource Management -- ICC Inc.
Mihir is a new assistant project manager at Intercontinental Construction Contracting Inc (ICC), a New Jersey based engineering/construction company. As his first task, he assists in managing and planning for the west point project which starts in January. In February, he got a call from the structural steel supplier that delivery to one of new buildings at the site will be delayed by one week. This means one week delay of the new building if no action is taken. Usually, ICC expedites some tasks to avoid project delay at the cost of construction labor.
Looking at past projects, Mihir noticed that the same kind of structural steel is used in all ICC’s military projects. Given about 19 weeks total project duration, the lead time of structural steel is relatively long (4-6 weeks) and varies quite significantly. Mihir wonders what else he can do to better match material delivery with project schedule except passively expediting tasks when a material delay occurs. Mihir also realizes that this problem is connected to a more challenging issue: A few major competitors are bidding against ICC on several construction projects. The customer, US Military, has made it clear that the winner must provide superior project schedule and competitive cost structure.