As Barry McLeod, the Director of Procurement and Marketing, your recommendation is needed to determine if the company’s supply chain can be moved from a push model to a pull model. The pull model is also called localization as the local managers gain greater influence over the items that are shipped to their stores. This is opposite to Wal-Mart’s push model where the store managers have little or no influence over what is shipped to the store. In preparation for a meeting with Ken Claudel, Vice-President of Logistics and Supply Chain, identify the issues, look for alternatives on which to make recommendations and formulate an implementation plan. Specifically, you need to consider the following aspects:
• The benefits of localization to the North West Company’s (NWC) suppliers and their customers.
• The potential risks of localization to NWC’s suppliers, NWC and their customers.
• An implementation plan that takes the necessary steps to capitalize on the benefits and minimize the risks.
The challenge for NWC is to move to a supply chain strategy based on localization that involves the devolution of responsibilities from corporate headquarters to the store’s management. As such, consider the following aspects when forming your implementation plan:
• Interorganizational information systems
• Cycle time reduction strategies
• Supply chain relationship development, and
• Social responsibility issues

Executive Summary
Issues Identification
Several key issues have been identified in North West’s current organizational supply chain. The first issue is the long lead times experienced for the purchase of general merchandise which is identified as all non-food items including but not exclusive to, home furnishings, apparel, and luggage. Although purchases from local and regional manufacturers have much shorter led times, the majority of merchandise is purchased