Your task:Your Chief Supply Chain Officer (CSCO) is requesting a review of supplier-to-customer processes as related to recent growth in our company and increasing demand for faster responsiveness to customers. One alternative is to decentralize our inventory into regional Distribution Centers; however, our ERP system is currently limited in the data available to make some of these decisions - and the output reports are very antiquated.Starting off the process, the CSCO directed that your Analysis Team use population data to pro-rate our national sales data as a starting point.For this analysis, you are asked to focus only on the highest volume product, Voice Assistant IoT Add-on Box, 1GB, SKU # AB-1035-G.The challenge is now yours to complete some computations and interpret the results!

1. Logistics - Purchasing:
2. Using the data of all orders for the Voice Assistant product line, what actions would you recommend?
3. Address the ordering costs.Is this a concern? How would you improve it?
4. What additional data would you need added to the output report?
5. Logistics - Inventory:
6. Compute the missing Inventory Holding Cost Rate using the provided Operating Cost data and Value of Inventory in-stock.
7. Using the demand forecast pro-rated for each region based on population and the previously computed optimal inventory policy (e.g. EOQ and ROP), compute the anticipated number of orders per year placed by each regional Distribution Center.
8. Describe managerial actions that could be taken to further improve on this optimal inventory policy.
9. Discuss how the number of Distribution Centers throughout the United States will impact your inventory costs.