Diebold Supply Chain Management

The Diebold's products were lacking quality. With 15,451 employees, Diebold, worth about $1.6 Billion, was hurt by a slowdown in demand for both automatic teller and voting machines. Diebold was forced to downsize its workforce by 5 percent. Diebold rejected an offer to talk about a merger with United Technology who offered $40 a share that translated to almost $3 Billion takeover! One of the reasons for the attempt was UT's intent to expand Diebold sales in faster growing European and Asian markets(Business News, Mar 2008).I'm going to leave why SEC wanted the UT to takeover!? alone. Before the crisis at the Diebold the company had grown, so the need to increase the number of manufacturing and distribution facilities rose. Because of lack of communications among different facilities and disorganization in terms of supply chain processes optimization, transportation and logistics minimizations, Diebold integrates a new SCM system into the overall operational processes to generate savings. Here is a quote from Diebold Director of Global Logistics on the challenges that the company was facing "we lacked a transportation management system," He acknowledges." Sure, I could tell you how much I paid a transportation provider, but I couldn't tell you why or where the bottlenecks were. How much were we spending on transportation? We didn't know. By mode ? By segment ? By supplier? By distribution? By transit time? We didn't know." This was a competency that Diebold didn't have before Menlo. Menlo World Wide Logistics a company with a luminous track record and an in-house supplier for the giant auto maker GM. Menlo was technologically competent and could operate globally. Diebold was able by strengthening its supply chain free up capital, and invest in Innovations, R&D, and new product design. Top level decisions--about product development, procurement, customer service--are increasingly being structured around the supply chain in ways which, only a few