1) If you were to establish your own product (goods) business now, describe briefly how you will implement warehousing, transportation, and inventory management.

2. Cite two real companies/entrepreneurs that practice efficient warehousing, transportation, and inventory management. Why do you say so?

Answer:

1. To best manage the warehousing, I would ensure that technology works or the business. I would ensure that space is utilized and effectively managed. Warehousing would be enhanced through the implementation of JIT to ensure that products are only held when they are needed. This way, the cost of managing the warehouse will be reduced and labor related issues will be reduced to the minimum level (Singh & Verma 2018). To effectively manage transportation, I would adopt the outsourcing strategy for the transport services. Outsourcing transport services will ensure that all operational costs and maintenance of the fleet belongs to the third party company. Transport costs will only be incurred when need arises and cost of vehicle maintenance eliminated. To enhance inventory management, all the inventory management systems will be automated. The supply chain process will be automated for easy tracking of stocks and the employees. This will reduce cost of operation as well as the lead time.

2. Two major companies that practice efficient warehousing, transportation, and inventory management include Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Wal-Mart and Amazon.com employ the JIT technique in the inventory management systems. Thy have automated their supply chain management systems to ensure that there is better following of stock (Lin, 2019). Amazon.com, for instance, utilizes online platform and does not maintain physical storage of products. This means that the firm does not incur any storage costs and this leads to the attainment of bigger profit margins.

References

Singh, D., & Verma, A. (2018). Inventory management in supply chain. Materials Today: Proceedings, 5(2), 3867-3872.

Lin, R. (2019). The Importance of Successful Inventory Management to Enterprises-A Case Study of Wal-Mart.