You set the scenario, choosing a perishable product or a single season product, or specifying an organisation/industry that produces/distribute/sell these types of products. You are to provide a paper that demonstrates your understanding of inventory control and planning in the context you set.
Your paper must include:
1. An introduction to your scenario, specifying which product(s)’ inventory will be discussed.
2. A discussion of the trade-offs faced by the organisation in your scenario who must decide on stock levels for perishable inventory. In this part, you need to illustrate the inventory cost structure by considering purchasing cost, holding cost, ordering cost and stock-out cost where applicable. You must use real examples from the relevant organisation(s)/industry to support your discussions here. To tackle this part of the report it may be helpful to critique these examples.
3. A critical discussion and reflection on designing an inventory replenishment system that is suitable for the organisation, based on the information and the discussions in part 2. The focus may include but is not limited to Periodic Review vs Continuous Review, Newsvendor model, Economic Order Quantity model, Order-Up-To model, ABC classification, and demand forecasting.
4. A brief conclusion in which you summarise your findings, highlight limitations and provide recommendations if any.
You must make use of secondary data (academic papers, trade magazines, company reports and Internet resources) in the production of this paper. The table below gives you a brief idea about the types of business and operations that could be considered in your paper, but you are free to pick any other relevant industry, EXCEPT FOR BLOOD PRODUCTS.
In this exercise, you are encouraged to be succinct in the communication of concepts. The paper may contain up to 2,000 words excluding data tables, figures, appendices, and references. Calculations are excluded from word count if any, and the references to the data used in the calculation must be supplied.
You are required to submit the assignment through Learning Central. Please ensure that you include your student number both in the file name and also on each page of the submission. Your submission should be properly referenced throughout using the Cardiff Business School Harvard style of referencing, and a full list of references provided.