Supply Chain Planning Case E

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

LGT2106 Principles of Operations Management

Case Study Assignment

Case E:

Jossey Menswear-the supply chain project

Zhang Rui

12131607d

2016/3/27

0.0 Current situation and new problems

Jossey Menswear is a retailing company which has been operated for more than a century. Its “Full price sale” (FPS) performance had yet been around 50 percent, which was satisfactory and ensured a profit for the company. But in the recent years, the fashion retail industry had a big change. That was because the traditional two-season division model no longer satisfying the needs of customers. More and more customers wanted to have more and better choices in the season transition periods. This change called for the retailing industry to provide more types of clothes every year in the “transition season’, which increased the complexity of products.

1.1 Eager needs to change

So as to cope with this change, Jossey Menswear needed to produce more kinds of clothes in each year, and a lot of other works needed to be done. The clothes needed to be properly designed to pander to the trend of the times, which was always different among different groups of people in a single period. And the products needed to be located in the right place where people in certain appetite is living or would gathering. Moreover, the products needed to be pushed out at a right time, at which the weather, trend and demands are all suitable for the clothes. It was already a mass of works, and there were also other items may affect the sale of the products, such as the size of clothes, promotion methods and so on.

So under the old practice, the prediction work was always hard and complex, and to meet all different needs, a large amount of inventory needed to be produced before the seasons and delivered to the customers. As the prediction was not always correct, most of those unwanted clothes may end up overstocking in the warehouse or being sold...