Logistics and operations management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Logistics and operations management - Essay Example The fundamental elements of logistics are the inventory management, capacity management and scheduling of deliveries, such that the consumers will have the desired products in their rightful quantities at the time they need to have them (Brandimarte & Zotteri, 2007:47). Therefore, on the event that the three fundamental components do not work in sync, chances are high that there will be inconveniencies caused to the intended consumers of the commodities, while at the same time there will be losses incurred by the suppliers of the consumption commodities. The whole chain of the logistic process starting with inventory management, through to capacity management and then to the delivery of the products to consumers must be systematically interconnected. The three components must remain in balance, since the success of one component determines the success of the subsequent process and ultimately the overall success of the logistical supply chain (Zavoral, 2010:5). Thus, on the event that the three components are not in balance, detrimental effects will occur both on the supplier and the consumers in terms of high costs, quality issues and market loss. High cost of commodities is a major consequence that might result out of an imbalance in the fundamental logistic components. Both oversupply and undersupply of commodities comes with associated costs (Christopher, 2010:36). Inventory management, as the first stage of logistics, is involved in the planning of inventory such that the there is balancing of the costs of maintaining additional inventory with the risks of not having the commodities when the consumers need them (Wu, 2008:16). Therefore, the inventory maintained by a logistical system must be capable of meeting the known and the unanticipated demands of the consumers, while ensuring that the costs involved are minimized to the lowest level possible. This can only be possible if the capacity management

Replacing a Legacy AIS Application Case Study Research Paper

Replacing a Legacy AIS Application Case Study - Research Paper Example Like any other system AIS is also a system consisting of different components which are interrelated to each other. Each of the sub-systems that make up the whole system performs several specific tasks which get integrated to be able to perform the ultimate task. Different components of AIS include, People, Procedures, Software, Data, and infrastructure for information technology. This study is all about the requirement of the public company which needs to replace its existing AIS. The needs and requirements of such change required by the company, a detailed analysis of all the various alternatives available to the company with regards to this change and the best possible alternative that needs to be implemented by the company have all been discussed in this study. Analysis The company being a publicly traded company must be requiring lot of transactions to be carried out every day. Hence in order to increase its efficiency, new effective AIS are the necessity for the organization. N ew AIS, replacing the old inefficient existing AIS of the company, can prove advantageous for the organization. ... New technologically improved AIS would help the company management to take various critical decisions which could have a significant positive impact on increasing the effectiveness of the management of the company, thereby increasing the profitability of the company. Various critical decisions that could be facilitated through the improved AIS of the company could be related to the accurate and precise information regarding the outstanding debt of the company, the sales trend, the assets possessed by the company, cash inflows and cash outflows, performance of the different product lines of the company, the trend of returns generated by the company, etc. AIS would primarily serve three purposes associated with it. They are a) It would help to effectively store the data related to all the business transactions of the company, b) The data would be then processed into useful information which would facilitate various decision making process and c) It would help in safeguarding the assets of the company through effective control mechanisms using AIS. Thus introducing improved AIS would help the company to have competitive advantage over its competitors and have a sustainable growth in future. However AIS has its demerits and risks as well. AIS are mostly computer based system. It mainly helps in automation of the various business processes done manually. This type of automation is associated with the risk of the inaccurate transaction data going undetected in the system. This could ultimately pave the way for the occurrence of accounting frauds. Since a larger number of users have the facility of accessing the data in the AIS, it is associated with control risk. The information might get edited by unauthorized