Description

ASSINGMENT

This assignment is due on 18 May 2020. In this assignment you need to produce a report based on your analyses of a fruit supply chain. Each student will receive two datafiles that represent two seasons of daily fruit picking / packing / transport and export activities along the supply chain. Your task is to analyse the information and data about this supply chain and produce a report. The data is rich. It is suggested that you start with this project straight away, do a few things, take some time off to think about what you have discovered and return with more ideas to test out. Please notify your lecturer as soon as you are ready to start. Each student’s data are unique and will be emailed to you.

STEP 1 (Approximately 70% of mark allocation): Use the data of the two harvesting seasons that were provided to you and perform a comprehensive analysis of this supply chain based on lean principles. This should include identifying muda, patterns and trends. Identify differences between the two seasons and whether any improvement or deteriorating trends exist from Season 1 to Season 2. Where necessary, make assumptions about costs and efficiencies to complete your analysis. Ensure that all your assumptions are clearly spelled out and develop a well-structured report that will provide a comprehensive diagnosis of the supply chain’s performance. It is less important to come up with solutions to improve matters and more time should be spent on identifying all the patterns, opportunities, costs and losses.

With this limited data, try to construct measures for:

• Understanding supply chain revenue
• The main risks and key performance areas in this supply chain
• Adverse environmental impacts
• Social impacts
• Develop a daily, weekly and full season dashboard that will give the supply chain managers

enough benchmarking information to stimulate a drive for improvement. Each dashboard can only have three KPI’s, so spend some time thinking about what are the most important parts of this supply chain.

STEP 2 (Approximately 30% of mark allocation): Using the guidelines of Hartmann and Dymond (2006) and Feizabadi et al (2019), perform an Agile analysis of this supply chain. Think of how you will advise the owners of this supply chain on their market strategy and identify opportunities where the supply chain may be configured differently to meet this strategy.

Your report does not need to contain a lot of text and doesn’t need a comprehensive list of supply chain improvement recommendations. Rather spend more time visualising the data through graphs and spend some time explaining the patterns that you have discovered. Assume each graph that you insert in the report equates to 50 words.

You are asked to analyse a fruit supply chain that runs from several orchids, to a few packhouses and end up at the port for regular loading onto ships that take the fruit the market. The executives in the supply chain decided to provide you with daily totals and daily averages since that will be sufficient to conduct your level of analytics.

A brief description of the supply chain:

1. During the harvest season a random number of casual workers will arrive at the orchids to pick fruit. Fruit picking is not an exact science and productivity levels can vary from day to day.
2. Fruit is picked and left in crates at the side of the orchids. At this point in time a small sample will be taken to test the fruit quality since the farmers insist that any damages to the fruit beyond their farms should not be a penalty to them.
3. Fruit quality is seasonal, can range quite dramatically and is a significant price determinant in the market. Early and late in the season the qualities can be as low as zero because the fruit is picked green or in an over-ripe stage. However, mid-season can see fruit qualities going up to 50 index points, which attracts very good prices in the market. Unfortunately, quality will continuously deteriorate along the supply chain, depending on the conditions in the chain.
4. Several trucks will be dispatched every day to collect the fruit from the side of the orchids and deliver them onto pallets at the closest packhouse. Truck numbers dispatched can differ from day to day, depending on driver availability and breakdowns.
5. If trucks cannot collect all the fruit on a day, the crates are simply left at the orchid until the next day.
6. The trucks can do a limited number of trips between the orchids and packhouses. These cycle times vary depending on traffic conditions and the time spent in queues at the packhouses while waiting to be offloaded.