Chad’s Creative Concepts Assignment
Summary: Founded by Thomas Chad in Sandusky Ohio, Chad’s Creative Concepts is a furniture manufacturer whose roots lie in custom built furniture pieces. As a result of the company’s reputation of high quality pieces, Chad’s Creative Concepts has recently entered into the retail segment of the industry and has begun to produce select standard or mass produced furniture items. While sales are increasing and demand is on the rise, the company is currently experiencing growing pains and must re-examine its operational processes and overall strategy to solidify not only healthy profits but continued happy and satisfied customers.
1. In order run effectively in the short term, Chad needs to manage inventory, scheduling (line time and labor), fulfillment, warehousing, capacity, and overall plant layout on a daily basis. As his business supports both low cost/low customization products and premium cost/high customization products, it is extremely crucial for him to monitor these factors to not only meet and fulfill customer demand, but to also maintain/earn a profit. In the long run, Chad needs to envision what his corporate strategy is. What does Chad’s Creative Concepts Stand for? If it is to support both types of product, he must make adjustments to his manufacturing capacity and layout, whether it involves investment in equipment, labor, and or space. Furthermore, Chad must examine his processes around inventory and warehousing to make them as lean as possible (something that they are not today). Lastly, Chad must analyze his fulfillment obligations and order time with his current manufacturers and he must do so via his sales/marketing team. What is feasible and what is not? How can new or amended processes be implemented to make this process for efficient and lean?
2. When sales and marketing started to sell standard pieces of furniture to retail outlets, another level of complexity was added into Chad’s Creative