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Supply Chain in Retail

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Submitted By nagercoil12
Words 1683
Pages 7
7-May-2013

1) Bullwhip effect defines as; It is a tendency of customer of material or product in short supply to buy more than they need in an immediate future (Bullwhip effect, 2010).
There are several factors involved to cause bullwhip effect; overreaction to backlogs, neglecting to order in an attempt to reduce inventory, communication gap in supply chain, in-accurate demand forecasting etc.
In order to deal with bullwhip effect, there are certain countermeasures to overcome the effect; proportional rationing schemes that encountered by assigning unit based on past sales. Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) can overcome exaggerated demand forecast. Special purchase contracts that can be implemented in order to specify ordering at regular intervals to better synchronize delivery and purchase (Bullwhip effect, 2010).
2) The sales department of Volvo offered special deals which caused the increase in demand of green cars. The manufacturing department was not aware of the promotion and believed that consumers had started to like green cars (Michael Bean, 2006)
3) The bullwhip effect can be reduced by keeping prices low and keeping demand steady. This reduces periodic high inventory levels and the need to discount products (Ivey, 2011).
VMI (vendor-managed inventory) is a model in which an accord is reached between the customer and the retailer based on customer demand. The customer to an extent decides the prices of the products in this model. Large amount of inventory is hence not held by the retailer and the cost of holding the inventory hence reduces (Hernandez, 2010).
Retail link is used by Walmart in order to reduce time lag or lead times in a supply chain while processing orders (Hernandez, 2010).
With the help of a tool called Point of sale (POS), product details, pricing, rate of sale etc is transferred into a database. Walmart’s manufacturers

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