Feet's Marketing Management

Deveye

AIU Online, SCM 645 U4 DB

September 16, 2012

Feets is interested in marketing and selling customized shoes that will be distributed from its distributing centers around the country. The concern at this point is to think about the computer technology that will help improve the company's supply chain with focus on customer satisfaction. This is to create the possibility to control effectively material requirement and availability when at the same time it's necessary to focus on production and process planning. Feets has to think about implementing both the material requirement planning (MRP) and the just-in-time (JIT) in the company's supply chain and operations processes. But the main question is to determine whether the combination of both can work for Feets' customized shoes vendors.

MRP consists of a computer-based system that is designed to allow companies an easy handling of orders and schedules of their dependent demand inventories. It's a production method used by companies in their business processes to deliver the right amounts of materials to the right place and at the right time using (Elbert & Griffin, 2005). MRP uses a bill of materials that consists of a list of parts and components with the required quantity, and a master production schedule that is the list of the end-items required along with the moment they are needed. MRP is thus a planning system developed to allow taken companies determine the requirement of materials in the production of the orders they have on hand and the time it is necessary to place orders for these requires materials.

JIT on the other hand is a manufacturing or production philosophy that seeks in most of the production process the elimination of all form of wastes, to mean waste of time, waste of materials, and waste of other resources. According to Elbert and Griffin (2005), JIT is a type of lean system that brings together all needed material at the precise moment they are required for each production stage, not before, not after, providing fast and efficient responses to customers' orders. This production system focuses also on continuous improvement in every step of the process, being appropriate for repetitive production line that produces a limited number of standard products and has consistent market demand.

Each of these systems carries its benefits or advantages. For example, MRP helps maintain a reasonable safety level of stock by reducing unnecessary inventories, helps identify possible process problems and operations disruptions, works well for batch productions, and allows the calculation of component parts requirements as far into future in accordance to the company's master schedule. In contrast, JIT system allows easy flow process and flexible productivity, provides quick and flexible response to companies' customer demands. It helps also lower operating costs, improve product quality by encouraging zero failure, minimize inventory, and increase overall production efficiency.