Supply chain management - Operation management - Essay Example

The aggregate planning is often shared with the supply chain partners since it has a great impact on the supply chain. All the stages within the supply chain ought to work hand in hand in order to improve the supply chain performance. This is quite essential because it would help synchronize the flow of operations throughout the supply chain (Boyer & Verma, 2009). The information that would be better shared with the supply chain partners is the vendor managed inventory because vendors are known to undertake the duty of planning on behalf of the trading partners.

My main reason for such a decision is to minimize the safety stock as a buffer on the vendor side due to the uncertainty in demand as well as minimize the safety stock on the consumer side due to uncertainty in supply (Liu & Kumar, 2003). The supply chains partners will have to ensure that there is collaboration between the overtime, inventory holding and the subcontractors. In case the aggregated plan is not achieved, a special handling process ought to be adopted so that the process of production is not slowed down, but met as anticipated within the six months.

Strategic sourcing is, as well, information that ought to be shared herein. Since the production of tankloads involves a chain of suppliers, sourcing becomes a complex match making procedure. The combined process of efforts from subcontractors, working overtime and the inventory holdings varies in its structure from chronological sharing. The success in information sharing throughout the supply chain, starting from demand forecast to order fulfilment, will see the Bottling Company minimise costs using this production