McDonald’s Sweden Case Study

Supply Chain Management for Engineers

Lessons for McDonald’s Sweden Case Study

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the case study “Supply Chain Management in practice – A case study of McDonald’s Sweden” under Coopers and Ellram (1993) model, showing the importance of supply chain management for engineers. Although, being famous for technical capabilities, engineers face a challenge of shift in their respective roles in growing international organizations. Thus, the challenges such as cost management, SCM and decision-making, require engineers to learn and apply management perspectives, learned theoretically and through experience in fields such as SCM. The case study indicates that the role of engineers has become important in a business because of their important contribution in cost management, SCM and decision-making functions.

Supply Chain Management for Engineers: Evaluation of McDonald’s Sweden case study

Introduction

Purpose and Scope of Report

This report deals with the analysis of a case study, named “Supply Chain Management in practice – A case study of McDonald’s Sweden” in context of relating management approaches for engineers. Although related to the technical aspect of a business’s operations, engineers and engineering department share the similar concerns as that of other functional departments of a business entity. In this specific context, engineers working in engineering related department, whether closely related to production/manufacturing function or related ancillary function, have to meet company objectives related to cost management, supply chain management and decision-making issues such as information sharing and others). The purpose of this report is to related the given case study, with the engineering profession and explain how different management implications (primarily supply chain management) are related to engineers.

Problem Statement of Case study

Supply chain management, abbreviated hereinafter as SCM, is a management domain, established around thirty years ago with basic approach of integrating traditional business function, in and outside a business, to develop a long-term performance driven value chain, working as one. While easy to study in theory, SCM is difficult to implement, especially when it comes to real business world such as multinational companies (including McDonald’s). In addition to this, the literature on SCM, is highly converged in a sense that most of the recent theoretical and practical developments in SCM are based on the original publications of authors like Cooper and Ellram (1993), Houlihan (1985) or Jones and Riley (1985). However, in the given case study, the supply chain practices and management of McDonald’s Sweden are evaluated by considering the SCM evaluation framework given by Cooper and Ellram (1993). It is important to note that Cooper and Ellram (1993) differentiated supply chains from commodity chains by highlighting certain important aspects across the partnering chain. These aspects include joint reduction in channel’s inventory management approach, channel-wide cost efficiencies as total cost approach, long-term orientation, information requirements for planning and monitoring process, multiple contacts-based coordination between SCM partners and levels of channel, on-going joint planning, compatible key relationship philosophies (for role optimization), small breadth of supplier based for fostering coordination, channel leader enhances coordination, long-term risk and reward sharing, and ‘DC’ orientation through JIT, interconnecting flows, and quick response by SCM partners. In this context, this case study evaluates the extent to which theoretical principles of SCM adopted and how different SCM concepts are interconnected in practice, by McDonald’s.