Seminar 9

Seminar 9 Supply Chain Management

Business process Jig-saw

So far we have covered all the sub-processes of a business process. Yes, the entire process is rather complicated, and it is not likely to understand every details of it merely after a one-semester course. But it is more important to form an integrated impression and be able to see the whole picture of it. So this is today’s first task. Our group was seeing it simply as a process loop.

Some other groups applied value chain concept and also covered some higher level processes. Below is a similar business process value chain.

http://www.tcs.com

Project 1 Reflection

Next, James gave us some feedback regarding project 1. The most problematic part of project 1 was the netting in part 3. There are mainly 2 approaches to do this. The first one involves two steps, namely balancing customer side and vendor side and then doing the clearing. The second approach only need one step: clearing and posting the payments immediately. The latter was very easy to understand and conduct, so our group actually chose this approach.
However, what we haven’t considered was that in reality, the incoming and outgoing payments are in charge by different accounting people. In this case, who should be doing the netting? Therefore, it may make more sense to balance the payments first, and then some authorized people can check the balanced new item and do the netting accordingly. 

                                                                   http://www.inspiredbythis.com

I think we have neglected this point because we’ve got used to imagine self as the only staff in the company, just like when we were doing the labs. Although one person doing all the jobs would probably be overworking, sometimes it is easier to handle with fewer people. Remember that one of the largest benefits from SAP was solving the communication problem. However if all the things are done by myself, there isn’t any communication problem, because I know my whole plan and I know what I did last second. And of course, SAP also becomes less meaningful. So when playing around with SAP by ourselves, we are doing all the things, but we should think separately and really try to play the role of each employee.

Another insight from doing project 1 was that making things complicated is easier than making things simple. SAP has already simplified many processes, but I still can’t stop thinking in a complicated way. I was mainly in charge of part 2, which was to realize the function to receive order from the branch, to send invoice to branch, but receive the payments from head office. I was struggling to find a way to set the customer as the other customer’s head office and achieve the functionality. It turned out that there is a much easier way to do this: just set the head office as the payer for the branch. Sometimes we are doing unnecessary works without noticing it. It’s just like we want to eat egg, so we buy a pullet and try to raise her. It’s not just a waste of time but you may not reach your goal in the end.

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Supply Chain Management

We were randomly grouped and to play the mini supply chain game: The Beer Game. That was quite fun except for the internet connection problems…

www.masystem.com

My company was losing money all the way…L I don't know what happened with other department, because we didn't have communications. The problem here was that I, being a producer, heard that the productions would be delayed for 2 weeks, so every week I kept producing a lot… I didn't have an overall production planning, and wrongly expected that the orders would grow in the future.

The solution would be the enhancement of coordination, so that the customer demand information collected from retailer could go through the supply chain and finally reach the producer. In this way, the excess inventory storage cost could be saved. ERP Supply Chain Management System is not the only solution here, but the key point is to integrate the information from companies involved and generate accurate sales forecasts.