Envirnomental Analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Envirnomental Analysis - Essay Example First, the slow growth of houses brought a significant downturn on retail sales in terms of appliances, furniture and home furnishings. Consumer spending is also affected by stricter lending policies now being pursued by lending institutions due to default in mortgages and payments. Other economic factor affecting the industry is the high cost of gasoline which slices the consumers’ budget for household expenses and retail spending. Most likely , the following factors will pose a negative effect on the trend of industry sales and will be the trend for 20009, Punkett Research said.. The impact of high consumer debt levels will constrain spending. * The growing trend of expenditures can be influenced by lifestyles as shown in Plunkett Research. Consumers trend in spending supports healthy lifestyle with products that has more high value, long life, environment friendly, and low in consumption. The fast pace of technology has moved retail selling into new direction in selling. For instance, we are seeing now the rapid growth of on line shopping. Internet connections make shopping convenient for consumers. Report said that in 2008, internet business of retail selling have kept about 100 million consumers in their homes and business. Sales raked by Amazon in 2007 was $14.8 billion higher than in 2006 of $107 billion in 2006. A Shop.org. survey mentioned in Plunkets research t said that in 2008, on line shopping of 84.6 million consumers accounted for $ 72.0 million sales in 2006 and $ 60.7 million in 2007. Not to be outdone, Wal=Mart has joined the bandwagon in the e-commerce trading. In 1985, at the tune of $4 billion, company developed software that will give information on consumer behavior through the bar codes system. This information enabled the company to foresee demographic changes. Today, demographic changes may be seen thru the behavior of buying patterns of

Purchasing and Supply Chain Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Purchasing and Supply Chain Management - Essay Example Austin Wood Products (AWP) is a successful company located at Austin Texas and specializes in manufacturing custom made wooden doors. Its current turnover is $ 25 million per annum. Maximum sales take place during February to November but the productivity is hampered by unregulated inventory system. Sadly, until the inventory is physically checked at the warehouse, production is not certain of its availability. In half the cases the material required is unavailable and has to be ordered. This effects both production and delivery. The company expects an increase in turnover by 20% in the coming year but with such erratic and uncontrolled inventory management, the production manager is apprehensive of meeting schedules and is worried about loosing customers. It is an established fact that the Just-in-Time (JIT) based System is the answer to manufacturing operations. JIT has lead to the development of what is known as Lean Manufacturing. It offers scope for reducing inventories and introducing ways and means to improve productivity by planning optimal use of resources. Today manufacturing faces new challenges and has been offered a variety of solutions to manage these. Most prominent among them are the Material Planning Method (MRP) and Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) adopted by many leading solution providers like SAP. But the Theory of Constraints (TOC) is the culmination of the above and a better answer to industry needs. MRP uses fixed lead times to calculate the Bill of Material, often resulting in surplus stock of raw materials. It does not take into consideration materials available in hand. In other words the Purchase Process is built around orders in hand. There is little or no Production Planning and Production just follows availability of raw materials to plan its own executions. The focus is on orders in hand and essentially MRP plays safe ensuring that raw material is always available to Production. But this is both wasteful and ties up huge