Acme corporation currently has a 20

Interpreting and Employing Data to Build a Business Case Final Project – MGT 608 – Information and Supply Chain Systems Your company: You are a new Supply Chain Analyst with the ACME Corporation. We design specialty electronics that are components in larger finished goods such as major appliances, automobiles and industrial equipment. Manufacturing is outsourced to low-cost suppliers due to the significant labor contribution and closeness to electronic component suppliers. Your product: ACME Corp. designs a leading-edge family of devices branded as “Voice Assistants.” These are add-on boxes that many OEMs are using as plug-and-play devices in a wide variety of Internet-of-Things products. They are also sold directly to consumers as after-market items, but only for IoT devices that were built with our proprietary data-port. Figure 1: Product line of ACME Corp Voice Assistant IoT Add-on Boxes Your task: Your Chief Supply Chain Officer (CSCO) is requesting a review of supplier-to-customer processes as related to recent growth in our company and increasing demand for faster responsiveness to customers. One alternative is to decentralize our inventory into regional Distribution Centers; however, our ERP system is currently limited in the data available to make some of these decisions – and the output reports are very antiquated. Starting off the process, the CSCO directed that your Analysis Team use population data to pro-rate our national sales data as a starting point. For this analysis, you are asked to focus only on the flagship product, Voice Assistant IoT Add-on Box, 4GB, SKU #123-456789. The challenge is now yours to complete some computations and interpret the results! Your data: A detailed report from your ERP system along with secondary data from the U.S. Census Bureau (reference: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/data/data-sets.html) is provided. (Note: Sales to Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico are handled by a 3PL provider and therefore are NOT part of this analysis.) The consolidated EXCEL® file has incorporated several tasks already performed by the Analysis Team --- sort, cleanse, inventory optimization, etc. Other tasks remain for your team. Slide Show: please do a slide show on Logistic Purchasing, and Supply Chain Management, no more than 4 slides total. Please input your speaker notes on each slide as well. Detailed Requirements: Prepare a formal report summarizing your results and providing recommendations that are supported by facts. The required layout follows: A. Introduction: Describe the purpose of your project. Describe the background of the situation that is necessary to understand the project (e.g. your company and your product). Describe the data and its source. Overview what follows in the report: B. Management Information Systems supporting Sales: a. Describe what roles this sales data would be helpful in management of your Supply Chain. C. D. E. F. b. What other data would you need to make better decisions. (Ensure you fully explain the new data and your recommended decisions.) Logistics – Purchasing: a. Using the data of all orders for the Voice Assistant product line, what actions would you recommend? b. What additional data would you need added to the output report? Logistics – Inventory: a. Compute the missing Inventory Holding Cost Rate using the provided Operating Cost data. b. Using the demand forecast pro-rated for each region based on population and the previously computed optimal inventory policy (e.g. EOQ and ROP), compute the anticipated number of orders per year placed by each potential Distribution Center. c. Describe managerial actions that could be taken to further improve on this optimal inventory policy. d. Discuss how the number of Distribution Centers throughout the United States will impact your inventory costs. Logistics – Transportation: a. First, estimate (qualitative assessment only!) the location for FOUR new Distribution Centers (one for each Region). b. Next, create a table to assess each of the six options for shipping goods -- five modes plus intermodal makes six. Your table must rate relative cost, speed and flexibility (e.g. routing and delivery location options). In each cell, use very brief bullet-statements to state your assessment. c. Next, assuming that you have raw materials, components and finished goods arriving from suppliers in Asia and Africa and being delivered to each of the four Distribution Centers, state your modal selection from the Port-of-Entry to each of the Distribution Centers. d. Finally, as the Chief Supply Chain Officer is considering relocation of our current,