Procter and Gamble

Lori Carey

Business Information Systems

August 22, 2008

Procter & Gamble is among the largest consumer goods companies, selling 300 plus brands world wide, brands include Crest, Tide, and Charmin. As with many companies Procter & Gamble is always looking for ways to lower costs.

Staff at Procter & Gamble may need to help make decisions on new business ideas on where to allocate supply chain resources in order to reduce costs and to operate more efficiently.

Allocation of support to most valuable customers is a semi structured decision because helping customers is done daily although customer’s needs are ever changing. Predicting call center demand is also semi structured due to predictability is not feasible. Deciding parts inventory levels daily could be semi structured or structured as inventory ordering involves daily decisions based on sales, but still has a somewhat normal procedure to follow. Identifying competitive bids from major suppliers is unstructured based on the importance of cost savings, scheduling production to fill orders may be semi structured because although orders come in routinely the number of orders is unpredictable and allocating labor to complete jobs is structured because the job functions are the same.

Problem: Procter & Gamble may face high manufacturing costs

Solution: Restructuring manufacturing and supply resources

Choice: Using optimization models to figure out better supply resources and better manufacturing locations.

Solution/

Testing: Procter & Gamble restructured its supply chain and consolidated plants by 20% lower costs by $200 million each year, therefore the decisions paid off.

For this Procter & Gamble may have used the process in decision making which includes stages. Intelligence is the process of discovery of a problem and looking for answers to it.

Design includes finding and exploring many possible solutions to the problem. Choice is choosing between two solutions and Implementation...