As a giant enterprise, the client corporation specializes in automobile manufacturing, engages in industry engineering, auto parts and real estate development as its strategic businesses and conducts other investments. The client corporation is dedicated to become a top Chinese industry group with strong automobile manufacturing competencies and diversified business lines. The senior management of the client corporation desired to launch a series of improvement initiatives to solve its supply chain problems
Overall Comments：As the result of over emphasizing on flexibility, the client corporation ignored scales and efficiencies and lacked process management control, feedback and synchronization to ensure response rate and quality improvement. The client corporation also paid insufficient attention to the cost management
1. Planning and scheduling
− Inaccurate forecasting and ambiguous target market positioning
− The co-existence of materials deficiencies and High inventory
− Undesired collaboration for the planning at different layers and the lack of understanding for the system
− A large number of human interferences and manual operations (ie. PO， production scheduling)
− The lack of integration between JIT and SAP
2. Client Interaction
− Imperfect order management rules
− Frequent emergency orders/order cancelling
3. Distribution
− The lack of logistics network strategies
− Low service level for spare parts
4. Logistics inside the manufacturing sites
− Insufficient warehouse area during the peak season and large warehouse dispersion
− The inappropriate materials management and the co-existence of materials reception and materials delivery
− The insufficient channels in manufacturing sites and logistics
5. Manufacturing
− Large seasonal demand fluctuation and frequent manufacturing plan changes
− High work-in-process inventory
− Material stock-out and low efficiency in materials reception and materials delivery
6. Purchasing
− Imperfection of the purchasing strategy and process
− The irrational PO ordering（inaccurate or unreasonable big amounts for some PO）
− The inappropriate material supply and instable quality of the materials from some suppliers
− Partnership with suppliers to improve quality, reduce costs and reinforce research and development
7. Product development
− A large variability of client demands, a high percentage of changes and a long manufacturing cycle
− Insufficient product standardization and much human resources for BOM system establishment and configuration
1. Technology：The establishment of a strict and effective new materials number application process and a product configuration management system to plan the order contents, set up effective orders and develop BOM operation process
2. Purchasing：The perfection of the purchasing strategy, the launch of new purchasing models and the improvement of the supplier performance evaluation system
3. Planning：The reinforcement of S&OP functions to support the implementation of the plans of lower levels; the optimization of the inventory management through the inventory management rules and inventory management tools
4. Manufacturing: The restructuring of warehouse locations/routes; the rearrangement of materials reception and delivery based on manufacturing schedules to deliver materials to each work station, thereby reducing line-side inventory and increasing the delivery frequencies
5. Sales：The reinforcement of technical sales supports, the improvement of sales forces competencies and the reduction of order change likelihood through more clearly understanding the client demands and making standard definitions of intended orders
1. The completion of the evaluation for the client lean supply chain status quo
2. The overall planning for the performance improvement of the supply chain
3. The quantitative analyses for the business cases of improvement initiatives
