Forum- You may pick out one topic or several topics to discuss. The initial post must include in text citations and a reference list. Each week the initial post will include a reflection and conclude with a question for the other students to ponder.
To be considered substantive, your reply should add significantly to the discussion by building on others’ comments, pointing out similarities or differences in your backgrounds or course expectations, etc. One or two sentence responses such as “Hi, welcome to the course!” or “I feel the same way” are not acceptable.
Classmate Response to Advanced Business Logistics Financial Decisions:
The Forum discussion to “Focus on the Financial Impact and Innovation” is really key to the Supply Chain. I think it would be easy for a company to get so busy focused on product and suppliers and the movement they could overlook the process to review the financials. Many organizations focus their logistics on “movement” of the product and not as an opportunity continuous improvement process for the cash cycle.
Poirer, Quinn and Swink (2009), show that one of the key questions supply chain managers need to ask is, “ Are our cycle times at industry best standards? What would improving these cycles mean to our financial performance?” As a transportation consultant, we have discussions with customers on inventory cycle time (days in inventory) and what it means to the customer’s bottom-line. So often, in the logistics cycle their only focused on transit based production lead times and miss the opportunity to discuss the impact of days to sales outstanding. It would be interesting to answer the question, what would the impact be to the bottom line to improve transit to all customers by one day or inbound from suppliers by one day? Many supply chains are built on slower transit as a “given”. The savings is calculated only by lower transit costs and does not include labor or production savings. Although, small or low end parts, the opportunity for cost reduction is in transit savings, higher end items which carry greater impact to inventory carrying costs could be better realized by quicker turns in and out.
Looking at this depth of detail in the supply chain may be for a more mature supply chain network. It would be easier to find savings in warehouse, suppliers and products prior to moving into process evaluation. This process would be brought out through a balanced scorecard review process. How do you see cycles as improving financial performance?
Reference
Poirer, C., Quinn, F., Swink, M. (2009). Diagnosing Greatness. ProQuest.