Management
at the Wireless Cafe has a good relationship with their suppliers, though occasionally running out of tea or chopsticks or
rice noodles reduces profits. Jimmy remembers reading about SCM and ERP systems in his information technology class
in college, but he’s not really sure if the Wireless Café is big enough to be concerned about managing its supply chain
or planning enterprise-wide resource utilization. You are tasked with identifying opportunities to better manage inventory
– from noodles to napkins. First, though, you need to better understand a café’s supply chain.
- Who is in the Wireless Café’s upstream supply
chain? Identify ingredients the chef uses to prepare meals for guests. Then, use a tool like Visio, Word or PowerPoint
to draw a diagram that shows the flow of these ingredients and their accompanying information through the supply chain to
the Wireless Café.
Upstream
supply chain (supplier)
Local
farmer and fisherman
Ingredients
the chef uses
Glass
noodles
Ginger
The
Diagram will be at the bottom of this page.
- What are some potential problems in the supply chain?
Remember, an oversupply of lemongrass is just as problematic as an undersupply. What kinds of information can be used
by the Wireless Café management to prevent these problems?
Potential
problem in the supply chain
Since
both of the ingredients are raw material which have a short due date, therefore there are some potential problems occurs.
It will involve the distribution decisions whereby when the right time to distribute glass noodles to Shanghai Wireless Café
to prevent oversupply. Other than that, it also involve the production decision whereby the decision to find a quality wheat
that can made a good glass noodles needed by Shanghai Wireless Café for customer satisfaction. Cash flow decision also can
be one of the potential problems because the price of ginger and glass noodles are not fixed in every place. Therefore, the
price may vary.
Information
used by wireless café management to prevent the problem
The
kinds of information that can be used by the Wireless Café management to prevent this problem is that the implementation of
Supply Chain Management Software (SCM) in the organization. The objective is to improve the decision making for all the data
in the supply chain. But, to use SCM, Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP) needs to implement into Shanghai Wireless
Café. Using ERP, integration of all departments and functional information flows across organization onto single computer
system that can serve Shanghai Wireless Café management needs.
- Based on the days and nights you have spent at the Wireless
Café, watching the operations, observing the customers, it is clear to you that the satisfied, repeat customers are the foundation
of the Wireless Café’s success. You can see a real opportunity for CRM to have an impact and help to build this
loyal customer base. Describe either a customer-facing application, customer-touching application, or customer-centric
intelligence application you would recommend to Jade and Jimmy to help build their customer loyalty.
I would
recommend customer-centric intelligence application. This is because using customer-centric intelligence application, Shanghai
Wireless Café management can understand the behavior of their customers and how they prefer to do business. Other than that,
Wireless Café management can understand the products and services that the customer need and the ones that they buy. The identification
of best customers and the most loyal customer can be done. Using customer-centric intelligent application, Wireless Café management
can understand how efficient and effective their marketing, sales, and service business processes.
Customer-centric
intelligence applications are analytic applications that analyze the results of operational processing. The results can be
used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of operational CRM applications. The capabilities should include these high-level
functions such as data warehousing, reporting and analytic applications.
