Agiletronics is a consumer electronics company. One of its best selling product is a bookshelf stereo system.

This stereo system is sold worldwide, particularly popular in the more developed countries, such as US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan. With intense market competition, the delivery lead time demanded by the customer is very short, and in general, within 3 days.

The models sold in different countries are basically the same, but due to language (e.g. the packaging, the software and user manual are in different languages), and power supply differences (e.g. US uses 100V/60 Hz power, and the UK uses 220V/50 Hz), there is basically one unique model for each country.

Currently the supply chain of the company can be summarized as follows.

• The system is currently being built centrally in a factory in Toronto.
• Components are acquired from suppliers all over the world
• The finished goods of each model for different countries are built for stock according to a sales forecast
• The different models are then shipped to the warehouses in different countries as inventory

Due to poor sales forecasts, the business results has been very disappointing, with stock-out in some countries and excess inventory in others. For example, during the last Holiday season, there is wide spread stock-out in the US market due to extremely high demand, while at the same time, Japan was hit with lower than expected demand resulting in massive amount of excess inventory.

The major problem is the company cannot ship the excess inventory in Japan to the US, because the language is different, and the power supply is different.

Questions:

1. How would you re-design the supply chain so that it will satisfy the requirements for best customer service, short lead time and low inventory obsolescence? (10 marks)
2. Identify the push-pull boundary of the existing supply chain. Where will the push-pull boundary in your re-designed supply chain be? (10 marks)
3. Which part of the supply chain would you consider outsourced? What are the advantages and disadvantages? (10 marks)