Japadog Supply Chain Management Analysis

SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS

Supply chain management in JAPADOG is another consideration. Since JAPADOG just owns 5 retailers and less than 50 employees, their current target is on expanding and do not have much attention on supply chain improvement. Nevertheless, for every chain store, imperfect supply chain will become bottleneck with company's growing. We have arrived at the conclusion that for the long-term planning, JAPADOG faces these problems:

1. The bullwhip effect

JAPADOG's supply chain has two levels: demand of finish good from customers to retailers and demand of raw material from retailers to the supplier. In our investigation, our main focus, customer flow volume in the Robson Street store is higher than the stands. Also, four stands' customer demand fluctuates differently due to different locations. For example, some locations near the office building, so that demand on weekday will larger than weekend. Therefore, the bullwhip effect becomes an unavoidable problem here. According to the manager, it is fact that sometimes they need to transfer the raw material between retailers because the distributer ship same amount of order to every one.

2. Peak demand with special order

Secondly, JAPADOG offer special order and event, which causes the peak demand. However, they do not ask customers information about how long they should book in advance, which forces the high inventory to support these potential peak demands every moment. Usually, the retail that receives the special order will in charge of it without considering event location and whether other retails are free to make it.

SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Build CDC

Based on these problems, we advice JAPADOG to build the Central Distribution Centers (CDC) and hire two professional supervisor to manage it. CDC's location decision will be made with considering the free trade zones, distance to every retailer, political risks, environment regulation, etc. CDC will collect the reorder quantity from retailers in every cycle time and arrange them to the supplier. Supplier no longer ship product to retailers, instead, CDC contacts to supplier directly and ships the material to them according to the daily demand that they respond everyday and also the emergency demand.

2. Differ the daily demand and special order

The daily demand here does not include the special order and event. Researching on other fast food's customer ordering period, we advice JAPADOG to add the requirements of 0.5 book day for preparation. As a result, retailers cannot forecast these special orders when they respond to CDC everyday. For these reasons, once retails receive the special order, they should tell CDC. CDC