Operation and Supply Chain Strategy in Toyota and Amazon
Introduction
The main objective of business organizations is to remain competitive by providing a better services or best product to satisfying the needs of their customers. All business concentrate to satisfying the needs and wants of customers enables a business to thrive well in the competitive local and global market. Business put in places all important strategies on their operations and also on their supply chain to ensure they achieve their objectives. The strategies help the business organization to have workable long-term goals that focus on the future success of the organization. Operation strategy make sure that a company produces or services are in the path of quality performances, to its customers in a cost effective way. To effectively have a successful operation strategy, it is important that the strategy is divided into corporate, business and finally functional operations. On the other hand, supply chain strategy enables an organization to deliver value across the operations. The supply chain strategy details the step by step action to be taken by an organization in its operations to achieve the desired set goals. This paper looks at operation strategy of Toyota Automobile Company and supply chain strategy of Amazon.com, and how they have helped the companies in implementing their business strategies.
Literature review
Operations strategy
Operation strategy is how companies set a plan of goals for its business with the availability resources in it hands to meet the customer need in the market, and make sure company appraise orders by customers through anticipating inventory and the production inventory. In the modern world where technology has grown...
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...upply chain strategies are essential in achieving an organizations goal . Amazon and Toyota companies have been identified as successful companies, which are operating in almost in all parts of the world. The companies with a distinctive strategies on operations and supply chain and thus remain competitive in the international market. The most successful when focusing in the main core of the business competition, and controlling the souring of inventory and reduce it cost with maintaining a high quality product in efficient process . The advancement and adoption of technology in the operation of these companies, has enabled them survive and compete favorably in the retailing market all over the world. The companies have also been utilizing agile approach as well as lean supply; which ensures their customers are always served in time and this boosts their loyalty.
In the 1960s through the 1970s, companies realized strong engineering, design, and manufacturing functions were strong market strategy keys to create and capture customer loyalty. As the demand for new products rose in the 1980s, these market requirements were to increase their flexibility and responsiveness to adapt existing products and processes or to develop new ones in order to meet customer needs. As manufacturing improved in the 1990s, managers began noticing material and service inputs involving suppliers and their major impact on an organization’s ability to meet customer needs. As a result of these changes, organizations now find that it difficult to manage their own organizations. First, they must be involved in the management of their network of all upstream firms that provide directly or indirectly, as well as the network of downstream firms, which are responsible for delivery and market service of the product to the end customer. In order to succeed, managers have to realize that they cannot do it alone and they must work together on a daily basis with the whole organizations in their supply chains. Because supply chain management involves all functions within an organization, managers need to know what a supply chain is, why it is important, and the impact of supply chain management on the success and profitability of their organization. Today, Wal-Mart topped the list of the America’s biggest companies on the Fortune 500 list, “with sales of almost $345 billion — more than a quarter of a trillion dollars” (Forbs). Wal-Mart’s supply chain management is becoming recognized as a core competitive strategy.
Although Amazon has been active trying to find the perfect strategy to make profits, the numbers in its financial statements had not shown the most optimal results. We have discuss that even though its strategies have been right according to supply chain and logistics methodologies and theory, something had been missing to represent this successful strategies into financial results. It is seen that Amazon had spent too long time finding the right strategy which the last might be the one because in the financial statements profits started to come up. Amazon still have a long way to go to mature its strategy and represents it into profits for its shareholders.
Amazon.com was a venture into an emerging market of internet and had to face hidden and unexpected hurdles in order to survive and excel in the market. Therefore, Amazon.com kept modifying its strategies with their focus on enhancing customer experience of online shopping and to delivery exceptional services with complete convenience to their customers. One of the major strategic decisions was to compromise on cost saving stragegy when Amazon.com started to maintain its own warehouses in different countries in order to ensure timely and accurate delivery to their customers
To support this assertion Krivda (2004) cites the findings of AMR Research Inc. According to this research, companies that have adopted proper supply chain operation and management enjoy greater performance as determined by various financial measures. Specifically, excellence in supply chain can result in relatively accurate demand forecast therefore making such companies realize higher profit margin by approximate 5%, a 15% percent lower inventory, a stronger “perfect order rating” rating of up to 17%, and a comparative shorter cash-to-cash cycle time of about 35% (Krivda 2004).
To recap it all, we can clearly see that Amazon has respected their value chain and by doing so created a means of delivering time after time. Demand chain and supply chain relates to how a company can gain maintain and understand how to keep their competitive advantage for a specific period in time. We have learned that amazon has brilliantly placed themselves in a position that would anchor their consumer’s future buying decisions. With the proper information, correct management and direction and support companies should follow the way this company has set themselves up to become pioneers in the e-commerce business. This inspirational company took a strategic idea and waited for the best time to act and therefore created a lasting memory on the e-commerce business industry.
The furniture company Somerset needs to retain its customer service record and remedy any of its global supply chain issues before it has an adverse effect on the brand and start losing customers. With a frequent change in the product catalog, keeping an excessive inventory will cut its profit and some of the product may become obsolete even before the furniture hits the retail outlet stores. In order to achieve profit and success, business employee many strategies and the supply chain strategy are one of the operational management techniques that use analytical decision making process to achieve the company goals and provide tools to effectively compete in the market (Taylor and Russell, 2014).
Operations management strategies play an important role in any organization to achieve organizational goals. An organization uses these operations strategies to maintain and control all its operations...
Studying pre-existing models of operations management may be a smart approach to truly understand this field. But since technology is advancing by the minute, new concepts, and tools should be adapted for operations management. The book titled Operations Management strategically explains the different concepts, divisions, and approaches to operations management. References Encarta (2005) Definitions of Operations Management. Retrieved September 15, 2005.
Over the past couple of years, Walmart has boosted its e-commerce operations and bringing in a large portion of revenues from online sales (Aronow & Burkett, 2015, p. 20). Gartner Inc. describes Walmart as a “supply chain pioneer” that has continued its push into e-commerce and has expanded investment in multichannel drive-thru pick-up centers and a ‘click-and-collect’ grocery service offered at some of its stores (Aronow & Burkett, 2015, p. 20). One of the components of Walmart’s supply chain in which their success is heavily relied on is the continuous improvement of their supply management as a whole, particularly within their e-commerce division. According to an article on the website logistics company Cerasis, “Not only has Walmart excelled over the decades in traditional supply chain management but… is also focused on continuous improvement by investing more into emerging technologies to capture more of the e-commerce market…” (University of San Francisco, 2015). A concept that our class had discussed time and time again throughout the semester was the concept of continuous improvement. Any given organization or business is constantly focused on continuously improving their business for the better. For Walmart, they believe that the anticipatory action of investing in emerging technologies will help differentiate themselves from the competition
Operational planning is what drives strategic planning goals to a success. On a day to day basis, operational plans are being communicated and decisions are being made. Operational planning is important because it leads to the goals and visions of the organization and by doing that, operational plans must be made daily to keep the organization competitive in the market. Friend & Zehle (2004) discuss operational plans central to the allocation of resources, it uses inputs to scale operations in order to deliver information about all stages of the primary value chain activies and the support of those activities. Without operational plans, an organization would have no way to reach its goals that were set. The market is changing constantly and operational plans help keep organizations making effective
Once plans have been developed, an organization must address how management will be accomplishing be those plans. This involves operational plans that must flow from strategy; specify resource, time issues, and commitment of human resources. Operational plans at the lower - levels of the organization, have a shorter time horizon, and are narrower in scope (Bateman, Snell 2003 p.113). A good example of this is Wal-Mart's main strategic goal. It is to provide quality merchandise at an affordable low cost to consumers. Its operational goals focus on efficient logistics requiring technology and inventory management systems to help reduce costs so it can be passed on to the customer. Operational plans are derived from a tactical plan and are aimed at achieving one or more operational goals (Bateman, Snell 2003 p.113).
According to Aquilano, Chase, and Jacobs (2005), "Operations management (OM) is defined as the design, operation, and improvement of the systems that create and deliver the firm's primary products and services" (p.19).
University of Phoenix(Ed.).(2003) Operations management for competitive advantage[University of Phoenix custom edition e-text]. New York: McGraw-Hill. Retrieved February 01, 2005, from university of phoenix, Resource, MGT554- operations management website: https://mycampus.phoenix.edu/secure/resource/resource.asp
Operations management focuses on managing the processes of producing and distributing products and services. Operations activities often include product creation, development, production and distribution. It deals with all operations within the organization. Related activities include managing purchases, inventory control, quality control, storage, logistics and evaluations. The nature of how operations management is carried out in an organization depends very much on the nature of products or services in the organization, for example, retail, manufacturing, wholesale, etc.
The key performance drivers of Supply Chain Management (SCM) are - facility effectiveness, inventory effectiveness, transportation effectiveness, information effectiveness, sourcing effectiveness, pricing effectiveness, delivery effectiveness, quality effectiveness and service effectiveness. These drivers include various performance markers that may be measured quantitatively by gathering information and applying them in SPSS. The works here may principally be quantitative with spellbinding measurable investigation. In the current world, practical supply chain management to help the triple primary concern, (nature, domain, and economy) is likewise included in the extent of supply chain performance drivers. This is relatively a quite new research region.