Supply Chain Management Case Study – Pds Consumer Products

Supply Chain Management Case Study – PDS Consumer Products

1. Why do you think Alexandra will recommend the formation of a Project Management Office (PMO)?

When launching new products, the existence of Project Management Office is necessary. New product launching is a really complex task. Each department relative to launch new products needs to work cross-functionally. If every department insists its own opinion, it would be hard to communicate to each other and have a consistency result. In that case, every department would make decision only based its own performance that sometimes it may result conflicts among departments. Furthermore, the most important thing is that it would cost lots of money due to lack of efficiency and lower service lever, leading to the decrease of company’s revenue. Therefore, this is the reason why Alexandra will recommend to the company form a Project Management Office. She wants every department can work in tandem and have effective communication. If she set a Project Management Office, it would manage and integrate all the departments and also make decisions which can benefit the whole company instead of individuals or each department.

2. Where do you think the PMO should report (Alexandra’s role, marketing, engineering, supply chain, other) and how should it be structured (By global product line or region)?

PMO should report to supply chain department first because the ultimate goal of conducting a project is to boost the revenue, decrease the cost and reduce the lead time. Supply chain management department controls the whole value chain and plays the role as a coordinator. Therefore, PMO needs to report to supply chain management department first to make sure the whole company is on the right track. Second, PMO has to report to the engineering department. In this part, we can come up with ideas to satisfy customers by adding some specific feature and we need to discuss with R&D to verify if our new ideas...