Thursday, August 29, 2019

Exam Case Study Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Exam Case Study - Assignment Example Later to follow are the recommendations to overcome the stated problems and improve company’s performance. Problems faced Primary problems faced by Sunshine Shirts come under the category of delivery delays and bottlenecks in quality. Delays are attributed to factors like large number of inspections, inventory and warehousing issues and lengthy production cycle of shirts. Also, type and volume of orders in the three categories also contribute to delays in deliveries. For quality concerns, even large number of inspections is not proving beneficial since printing is not getting appreciated by the customers. Faulty shirts are also getting in the orders which are resulting in increased number of complaints and reduced customer loyalty. Delays in deliveries and quality pitfalls cumulate to rising costs but no increased profit margins. Thus, an indirect offshoot of the above mentioned problems is an urgent need for cost-cutting campaign which can not be realized unless careful and m eticulous strategic planning is undertaken. Following next are specific instances which have led to the above mentioned problems of faulty planning, delays and quality concerns. Sources of problems Superficially, problems seem to be very generic, trivial and operations based. However, upon careful observation and deep analysis, the sources of these problems vary from strategic planning to inventory management, quality management and even setting up of performance measures. Detailed breakdown of sources of problems is given below: Strategic planning Strategic planning is a wide concept covering numerous operations within a specific business. From human resources to operations, production to management and even after sales, strategic planning entails setting up of standards, crafting plans according to those standards and measuring actual outputs to find out deviations. At Sunshine Shirts, planning has not taken a serious form. Various loopholes exist in different functions and domain s. Opening sentences where it is mentioned that the company budgeted for but still reported losses is a clear example of poor planning. Next for example, the problem of delivery delays can primarily be attributed to planning glitch. Before actual inventory management, it is the work of planning to ascertain the flow of raw materials, work-in-progress and finished goods. Faulty planning has led to faulty warehousing and chaos at factory space. Secondly, customer complaints have increased at Sunshine Shirts due to printing issues as ink on shirts peels off. This might be due to wrong supplier selection of printing inks which is again a function of strategic planning in a company. Further, regarding costs, company officials and heads of various departments are suggesting different solutions- reducing number of inspections, outsourcing, and charging premium price for better quality and even enter women shirts market. However, consensus cannot be achieved in finalizing a solution. This i s because the company does not know whether its competitive advantage lies in low cost or better quality. As such, direction of its strategic planning is not focused on one of these dimensions, leading to disadvantages and losses in both. To cut costs, managers are recommending outsourcing some of the activities to nations where production costs are lower. However, they do not see that expenses incurred on its three types of customer segments outweigh the returns yielded by these. Thus, even customer profitability analysis is not

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