Companys Supply Chain: Lantech - Essay Example

At the same time, Deere also aligned its production processes with sales forecasts, supplier lead times, and customer demand for the products, which enabled the company to immediately respond to rapid changes in product demand and reduce the company’s vulnerability to external factors that affect its profitability and operations. Similarly, Revlon’s recent inventory restructuring initiative was influenced by the increased need to optimize all aspects of the company’s resources to meet greater customer-service expectations and to manage capital flows from inventory to other business activities such as research and product development. In contrast with Deere’s efforts, Revlon emphasized a process-based approach to reduce inventory costs. This entailed targeting the inefficient parts of the company’s supply chain for restructuring in order to achieve better synchronization across the functional areas of the business. For one, Revlon focused on making sustainable changes by changing attitudes and behavior within the company that contributed to inefficient business processes in order to align leadership and management practices with the demands of the new inventory management process. Second, the company embarked on a redesign of its inventory management and control process to reduce the large bulk of inventory at the stock-keeping unit level which in the past made the company vulnerable to demand and supply volatility.

2.)       Among the problems at Lantech that were exposed by the loss of patent protection were inferior product quality which meant reduced cost-competitiveness of the company, lengthy production cycle and lead times, inefficient production process, and high inventory costs. Consequently, the emergence of a competitor forced Lantech to restructure its overall production and inventory management processes. To address product quality issues, the company implemented a standardized production approach that emphasized the specific requirements for a product and the proper way of assembling and creating a product. This also enabled the company to set a specific time frame for the production of a single product unit, which allowed it to resolve both the issue of product inferiority and reduce the lead time for the production of a single product unit. Likewise, the company streamlined its production process to counter the lengthy production cycle. This was done through the restructuring of production units to a product-based one and the development of quick changeover mechanisms that enabled the continuous flow of production and eliminated the costly transfer of the products from one department to another. In the same manner, Lantech addressed the problem of inefficient company production by reducing the complexity of its assembly lines and adopting a just-in-time (JIT) production framework. The implementation of the JIT framework enabled the company to reduce production costs by minimizing time wastage and also enabled Lantech to significantly reduce its inventory costs by producing according to demand instead of trying to produce as much product as possible. Hence, the JIT also enabled Lantech to manage its inventory in a cost-efficient manner which gave it better financial liquidity. Thus, the adoption of a leaner production structure that emphasized standardized production processes and demand-based production in the assembly lines enabled the company to address the problems and inefficiencies of a complicated production approach, which enhanced Lantech’s capacity to respond to higher levels of customer expectations.