Question: Operations Medium difficulty Retail Interviewer-led case This case relates to a relatively small fashion client that is looking for ways to speed up its shipping

Operations Medium difficulty

Retail Interviewer-led case

This case relates to a relatively small fashion client that is looking for ways to speed up its shipping process.

Problem definition

Our client is CBA Fashion, a small but growing fashion e-commerce company that sells menswear products in the UK. The client uses bespoke algorithms to recommend clothing and outfit ideas to men, and ships clothes to men across the country. The client doesnt hold its own stock; rather, when a customer places an order, the client then triggers orders with its suppliers, consolidates these in its own warehouse, and then ships them out to its customers addresses.

Partly because of this model, the client has a relatively slow shipping time. It currently takes an average of 3.5 days from the moment a customer places an order to the moment an order arrives at their address.

The client wants to reduce this shipping time by 1.5 days, to reach an average shipping time of 2 days.

How can CBA Fashion reduce shipping time to reach an average of 2 days?

Additional information

If the candidate is unsure, clarify that shipping time here refers specifically to the time it takes from when a customer places an order to when that order arrives at their address.

If a candidate asks for a specific breakdown of the major process steps in the current 3.5 days, mention that there are three main steps

Inbound logistics (ordering from suppliers to the client warehouse): 1 day

Warehouse processing: 0.5 days

Outbound logistics (shipping from our warehouse to customers): 2 days

If the candidate asks about cost constraints, flag that the client wants to avoid big investments at this stage, and can only afford to increase their overall processing cost by up to 0.80 as part of this programme.

Question 1

How it might be optimized?

What information is missing?

Question 2

Switching out the supplier seems like a good option for reducing processing time on inbound logistics, but well need to confirm how much time wed save by doing this.

Consider the following additional information on this process step:

The French supplier wed swap out reflects 10% of items shipped to customers

Our orders contain on average 2 items

All local UK suppliers ship to us in 0.5 days

Given this information, can you calculate the shipping time for the current French supplier were using? What is the overall impact of swapping out this supplier on our shipping time overall?

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