Operational Management Assignment : Kudler Fine Foods

Introduction

Kudler Fine Foods is presented in the virtual organization portal of the University of Phoenix MBA 502 rEsource page (2008). Kudler fine foods is a specialty food store located in the San Diego metropolitan area. It is a one-stop food shop with the finest selection of very best foods and wines at reasonable prices. The shop offers wide range of products such as fresh bakery items, fresh produce, meat, seafood, condiments and packaged foods and specialty dairy products. Within five years Kudler Fine Foods company had expanded to three branches (University of Phoenix, 2008). Recently, Kudler plans to start contracting with local growers of organic produce. This paper identifies the business processes at Kudler that could be affected by this decision and it also describes how the supply chain would be affected.Then,it explains the different quality control tools and performance standards that kudler need to implement to ensure the effectiveness of its operations.

Business processes at Kudler

A process is any part of an organization that takes inputs and converts them into outputs that, it is anticipated, are of superior value to the organization than the original inputs (Chase, Jacobs, Aquilano, 2005). Understanding how processes work is essential to the competitiveness of a company (Chase, Jacobs & Aquilano, 2005).

The different processes that would be affected are Purchasing, Inventory and delivery planning. At present at Kudler, there is no purchasing department. The department managers of each store determines the product requirements for his or her department and places the purchase orders directly with suppliers. The department managers are solely responsible for getting the best price and quality on their purchases.

In this case when it is brought from different local growers, it would be difficult to maintain the same quality and price. A problem from the processors and manufacturers perspective is the variability in quality of organic food (Knudson,2007).Because of this reason the price would also vary. The customers always expect good quality at a minimum price.Sometimes, it would be difficult for the department managers to find out the best price which should also matches with the other Kudler stores.

Since the suppliers are local growers,a make-to-order process will be followed to keep the inventory costs minimum.Because of this make-to-order process,the inventory has to made regularly, to maintain that no products are out of stock.In multi-period single-item order release and scheduling problem is considered in which the delivery schedule of the orders is determined through the planned lead times, and the capacity loading decisions are separated from the order release decisions in a way so as to plan for on-time deliveries.