You're a key member of the Supply Chain team at a start-up company called PetSpecs specializing in producing and selling dog, cat, and hamster glasses through your website and retail store network. You're in charge of placing replenishment purchase orders (PO) for hamster frames and keeping track of the units until they arrive at the PetSpecs warehouse. The process takes you a long time, and you know there must be a faster, more accurate way of doing things so that you could place dog and cat frame purchase orders in the same time it normally takes you to create a hamster purchase order, and so that fewer errors will be made along the way.
To place a PO, first you need sales projections from the Finance team. The Finance team is an old school bunch, so naturally they write their records in a handwritten ledger with a feather pen. You diligently type all the numbers you need into your laptop and hope you drank enough coffee that morning to avoid any entry errors.
Next you need to check with the Marketing team to see if they have any plans to increase marketing spend in the future, which could affect the sales projections from Finance.
Since the Merchandising team keeps the product attributes (which change from time to time) for each hamster glasses SKU in a secure computer (that doesn't have internet access) in a separate Pet Specs office, you have to walk across town with your laptop and put your data entry skills to work again.
Now you have all the information you need to place the purchase order. Until this point in the process, you've collected all your data in a Google document so the rest of the Supply Chain team has access to it. Unfortunately, your manufacturing vendors are located in a country that eschews Google so you can't give them access to your document. You carefully copy and paste everything into an Excel file, complete with pictures of each frame for visual confirmation.
Before you can hit send, you need the proper approvals from the Finance team. They didn't know you planned on placing a PO today so they won't have time to review it for at least four more days.
After you've placed the PO, the Tech team likes to keep a record of everything in their data warehouse as well, so you need to send them a copy in binary code (which you luckily can translate on the fly).
If you want to check on the expected delivery date of a PO, you have to use Skype to call the manufacturer, since the status is not documented anywhere. You typically do this at least once for every PO.
Once the hamster glasses are produced and shipped, you need to let the warehouse know that they are coming so they can be sure they have enough space to store them. Your warehouse uses an entirely different computer system so they need the PO information in a text file.
Before you can distribute the glasses to your furry customers, they need to be inspected by the HHA (Hamster Healthcare Association). You are juggling so many PO's that you forgot to schedule this shipment for inspection and it was delayed for two weeks.
Due to errors made along the way, the manufacturer typically overships 20% of SKUs and underships 10% of SKUs, leaving you with excess stock of some SKUs and shortages of others.
Please provide the following deliverables:
1. Create two high-level process flow charts:
a. Current state of the process from data gathering to product arrival at warehouse
b. One potential future/ideal state scenario. (You may invent any existing or non-existing technology you like)
2. Draft a clear and concise email messageto the head of the supply chain team and the CEO of the company to kick off a project to improve this process, addressing thesetopics:
a. How you plan toidentify the gap between the current and future state of the process
b. The dimensions you are attempting to optimize, and how you will measure success
Your deliverables may be in any format/medium you like or have access to. Remember; don't spend more than a couple hours on this project!