Michael is a small business owner. He started his company in 2019 with only 2 employees and

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Question:

Michael is a small business owner. He started his company in 2019 with only 2 employees and is now experiencing some growing pains. He goes to an entrepreneur convention and speaks to a couple other business owners.

Michael's Company/Product Info

He has an ecommerce company (where he outsources manufacturing to suppliers overseas) offering Sleep Eye Masks to customers for sale via his website. He has a unique product offering to customers that does more than the traditional eye mask. It actually encourages you to sleep in a personalized way vs other sleep masks that only provide black out/darkness. He started his company with one product, but now in 2023, he now offers 12 SKUs (6 different colours in two sizes). He has had to search for a secondary manufacturer to assist with growing capacity. The lead time on a purchase order is about 90 days for production, and about 7 days in transit by air to the warehouse.

He now has 12 employees consisting of a Marketing team of 6 (advertising and digital ads, Brand, Graphic design) a Finance/accounting team of 2, customer service team of 3 and an Operations team of 2 (an Operations Manager and a Supply Chain Coordinator). In addition to this, he has other ideas for new products and is thinking of adding to his team to bring some product design in house (consisting of an R&D and engineering team) to continue with his personalized and unique product offering.

Michael is selling on his ecommerce site to the USA market and has an outsourced warehouse (3PL) in California as it is closest to his customers on the West Coast.

Up until this point, Michael's team has been using Google Suite (google Docs/sheets) for all processes and information tracking. The only more complex Operations/Supply Chain information system that is being used is access to their 3PL's WMS system. He is using their company access to the WMS to track his inventory.

Michael speaks to some other members at the convention.

Sam owns a small restaurant. She offers inexpensive street tacos at a small "hole in the wall" place. Her customers love coming to her restaurant for an inexpensive, cozy and tasty quick bite to eat. She has trouble with ordering and always runs out of food before the night is over. She doesn't order much in order to keep her costs low and to ensure the ingredients do not expire before she can use them. She uses an e procurement system to order groceries for her restaurant kitchen.

Avin has not yet started a company yet, but is looking into options for starting a business in providing restaurant owners with "last minute" groceries. He already owns a warehouse/storage location and delivery trucks and wants to use them to offer quick/flexible services to restaurant owners that require last minute deliveries. This way, he is able to store lots of buffer stocks so restaurant owners don't have to. His goal is to provide quick and amazing service to his customers.

Assignment Question: Based on what you know and can assume from the above case study, provide a "size up" analysis for each of the 3 business owners scenarios.

Size Up: is an analysis of a firm including current issues, strategies, bottlenecks and then further analysis and evaluation of requirements.

In your Size Up for each company, include a minimum of the following:

Product/service company?
Overview of the Company Supply Chain & complexity - can include a diagram?
How many suppliers? Distributors/warehouses? Locations? Products?
Product specific information? Ie expiry dates, storage, strategy?
What activities are internal/external (ie where does manufacturing etc occur?)
Issues if any (implied from case study)
Primary strategies/competitive advantage - see slide 5, week 5 PowerPoint
Resulting conclusions/evaluations on processes and information system requirements (what they need/don't need) - note this isn't a full requirements plan, but you may choose to make conclusions on what the company's primary processes are and requirements they have. Ensure this is relevant/feasible. It is very unlikely any of these companies need an ERP. Ensure you also look at the size and scale of the company