Li & Fung is a global trading company with clients being major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target and Disney World serving a network of 12,000 suppliers. Li & Fung is engaged in collaborative planning, relying on collaborative technology to forecast forthcoming trends. Being an intermediary between customers and suppliers, collaborative planning is critical for the company. Li & Fung used to deal with its clients mostly by phone and fax, with e-mail counting as high technology. But thanks to a new web-services platform, its processes have speeded up. One of the most important technologies has turned out to be videoconferencing. It allows buyers and manufacturers to examine the color of a material

or the stitching on a garment. The information system also allows Li & Fung to make changes fast as well as to look across its operations to identify trends.

a) Explain the organizational objectives that CPFR is trying to achieve. Stress its advantages and disadvantages.

b) A complementary process that is intended to match supply and demand planning is Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) through functional collaboration. Initially, S&OP has been used for internal company planning, while recently has been extended to include inputs from their collaboration trading partners.

Recognize the differences between the CPFR and S&OP. Explain the differences in the organizational objectives they are trying to accomplish.