Chicken Run Case

Question 1

According to Fisher, the problem of product availability is mainly caused by a discrepancy between the type of product and the type of supply chain strategy the company is adopting. Furthermore, he reinforces the idea that the nature of demand should be consider when choosing a specific supply chain strategy. (Fisher, 1997) However, Christopher and Towill are going a step further and specify that the specific requirements of a certain market can be met by combining two supply chain strategies with the use of a decoupling point. They termed this new strategy as “leagility” or hybrid supply chain strategy. (Christopher & Towill, 2000) In order to better understand how this hybrid strategy could be applied for Wings&Legs, the characteristics of the company`s supply chain are depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Description of Wings&Legs supply chain

According to Gattorna, “lean supply chains focus on efficiency and lowest cost to serve. In order to achieve this outcome, high-volume, low-variety business is ideal, and products are made and distributed to forecast”. (Gattorna & Friends, 2009) Looking at his definition and the characteristics of the poultry supply chain, it becomes clear that a lean strategy should be implemented for the upstream part of their supply chain.

In contrast, having an unpredictable demand pattern suggests that a responsive strategy should be implemented for their downstream processes. According to Christopher, “agility is a business-wide capability that embraces organizational structures, information systems, logistics processes, and, in particular, mind-sets. A key characteristic of an agile organization is flexibility.” (Christopher, 2000) The current problems regarding the company`s service levels signals that Wings&Legs should adopt an agile strategy for the downstream part of their supply chain in order to be able to fulfil customer`s demands. Figure 2 depicts the poultry supply chain and presents the proposed strategies...