Mgt 322 – logistics management – 2

Critical Thinking

The global marketplace has witnessed an increased pressure from customers and competitors in manufacturing as well as service sector (Basu, 2001; George, 2002). Due to the rapidly changing global marketplace only those companies will be able to survive that will deliver products of good quality at cheaper rate and to achieve their goal companies try to improve performance by focusing on cost cutting, increasing productivity levels, quality and guaranteeing deliveries in order to satisfy customers (Raouf, 1994). 

Increased global competition leads the industry to increasing efficiency by means of economies of scale and internal specialization to meet market conditions in terms of flexibility, delivery performance and quality (Yamashina, 1995). The changes in the present competitive business environment characterized by profound competition on the supply side and keen indecisive in customer requirements on the demand side. These changes have left their distinctive marks on the different aspect of the manufacturing organizations (Gomes et al., 2006). With this increasing global economy, cost effective manufacturing has become a requirement to remain competitive.

To meet all the challenges organizations try to introduce different manufacturing and supply techniques. Management of organizations devotes its efforts to reduce the manufacturing costs and to improve the quality of product. To achieve this goal, different manufacturing and supply techniques employed. The last quarter of the 20th century witnessed the adoption of excellent, lean and integrated manufacturing strategies that have drastically changed the way manufacturing firm’s leads to improvement of manufacturing performance (Fullerton and McWatters, 2002).

Consult chapter 7 of your textbook or secondary available data through internet and answer the following questions.

Question:

1. Why Companies adopted Lean Thinking and JIT model? 

2. Discuss major types of Waste, companies has to keep in mind during production. 

3. Due to pandemic COVID 19 emergency, do you think agile supply chain is the right concept in this kind of situation? Give reason with example. 

4. Reference (0.5 Mark)

The Answer must follow the outline points below:

· Each answer should be 300 to 500 range of word counts.

· Lean Thinking and JIT Concept

· Agile Supply chain 

· Their Main functions

· Reasons with suitable Examples

· Reference use APA style of referencing