| dc.description.abstract | Company A is a brand owner of household paper products in China. Its upstream suppliers include paper pulp, chemicals, packing materials and other raw materials supplies, while its downstream channels include discount stores (key accounts), general trade dealers, commercial customers, semi-finished paper customers and newly-implemented e-commerce sites. The efficient collaboration among supply chain partners is an important factor to guarantee Company A can survive and flourish in the market.
The supply chain operation is one that each partner works independently of one another, without sharing of market information, and unable to derive accurate sales forecasts. Production plans based on such inaccurate sales forecast thus deviate from market demand. As a result, there are frequentproduct shortage and over stock problems. In addition, lead times for raw materials procurement are relatively long. Thus, Company A have to prepare more inventories in order to avoid shortage of raw materials. When sales of products are poor, raw materials will also be excess. Without a good collaborative relationship among supply chain partners results in low efficiency.
In supply chain management, CPFR (Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment) has been employed as an effective tool to tackle such problems for many years. This study attempts to adopt CPFR for Company A, to solve these problems. To effectively plan for adoption, a reengineered supply chain operations process is proposed. It will change the current situation of independent operations into new and inter-dependent operations, where partners collaborate, and share information and risk. In addition, a required CPFR platform is analyzed and designed.
The proposal is expected to improve the inter-company processes, and result in smooth and efficient operations, and arrive at a win-win situation among partners. | en_US |