CASE STUDY

1. What parts of the supply chain are most closely involved with the situation in this case? What is the
responsibility of each part in order to maintain a smooth flow of material?
 Materials Planning
- The materials planning department's responsibilities are planning requirements of
consumables, raw materials, spare parts, and other miscellaneous issues.
 Procurement Department
- The procurement department is authorized to issue Invitations to Bid, Requests for
Proposals, Requests for Quotations, and issues contracts. The procurement departments
issues purchase orders, develop term contracts, and acquire supplies and services.
 Production Control
- The production control responsibilities are predicting, planning, and scheduling work
considering manpower, materials available, and other capacity restrictions.

2. What initially appears to be the problem? What really is the problem(s) in this case?
- Initially, the problem appears to be proceeding to Ace Technologies' main ability to maintain
steady production and good quality. The real problems are poor forecasting, poor
scheduling, demand exceeding supplier capacity, and poor communication of the supplier
and the buyer.

3. How easy is it to switch suppliers? What could complicate a firm’s ability to switch to a new supplier?
- The ease of switching suppliers is very difficult, considering they are currently in the middle
of production, its cost, etc., and they would potentially lose customers during their
transition of trying to get a new supplier.

4. What does it mean to get to the root cause of a problem?

- Getting to the root cause of a problem basically means that you would want to evaluate
initial audits of Ace Technologies prior to them being selected as suppliers, and appraise all
meetings which discussed quality standards.

5. What does it mean to be a good customer? Why does a buying firm want to be perceived by a
supplier as a good customer? Provide specific examples of what a firm must do to be a good supply
chain customer.
- A good customer is a customer who has a trustworthy relationship with the supplier; a
customer who seeks mutually beneficial arrangements with the supplier; a customer who
would share their expectations openly and early; a customer who provide clear direction
and feedback to the project team to control the scope; and lastly, a good customer
understand the changes to a project that modified from the original base requirements.

6. Explain the role of performance measurement in managing supply chain activities.

- Performance measurement allows the supply chain to assess themselves if they are doing
good or bad and likewise take action to improve their performance. Like, if you want to buy
 a vehicle, you check its mileage and speed. When we are about to purchase a cell phone, we
check its battery and processors because these are the parameters to check performance.
Similarly in supply chain management, the work of a supply chain is to reduce the cost and
maximize the profit, and its main motive is to smoothly flow the product from one end to
other with minimum cost. So, we check the performance of supply chain in order to test the
flow of our material and to check if there is any problem or excess cost in our supply chain
which can be further reduced to maximize the profit.

7. Why can changes within a supply chain disrupt the normal flow of goods and services within a supply
chain?
- Changes disrupt goods and services because of transportation delays, and reworking
products because of poor quality of the material.