Read The Paper By Mason-Jones, Naylor, And Towill Compare And Contrast The 3 Case Studies :Supply Chain Operations Management Assignment, UOB, Ireland

Assignment

Read the paper by Mason-Jones, Naylor, and Towill.“Lean, agile, or agile? Matching your supply chain to the marketplace.” That can be found in Additional Resources.

Compare and contrast the 3 case studies. What are the key similarities and differences? Using this information outline how you would approach supply chain design for a product or service that you are familiar with.

This case study was written in 2000, what difference might digitalization have in terms of both supply chain design and performance?

Draw on the module content, core texts required reading, and associated resources (as well as other research you might do). Reference all the sources in Harvard referencing style as shown in your referencing guides.

Introduction

The success and failure of supply chains are ultimately determined in the marketplace by the end consumer. Getting the right product, at the right price, at the right time to the consumer is not only the lynchpin to competitive success but also the key to survival. Hence, customer satisfaction and marketplace understanding are crucial elements for consideration when attempting to establish a new supply chain strategy.

Only when the constraints of the marketplace are understood can an enterprise attempt to develop a strategy that will meet the needs of both the supply chain and the end consumer. Supply chain performance improvement initiatives strive to match supply and demand, thereby driving down costs simultaneously with improving customer satisfaction.

Supply chain uncertainty

Much uncertainty evident in supply chains is system-induced and magni®ed by the `Bullwhip eŒect’, as opposed to being present in the marketplace. The supply chain dynamics wave propagation observed by Forrester (1961) used to be called `demand ampli®cation’. Nowadays it is more commonly termed the `Bullwhip eŒect’ (Lee et al. 1997) due to the characteristic of increasingly magni®ed and hence worsening behavior observed upstream from the source of the disturbance.

System-induced uncertainty is inherent within many supply chains due to the strategies and relationships involved and is therefore within the direct control of the companies involved. Hence, it is our experience that many of the detrimental eŒects of uncertainty can be alleviated by working hard to reduce the system-induced eŒects (Towill and McCullen 1999). Done properly, this leaves the supply chain to develop a strategy that needs only to deal with marketplace uncertainty.