7108IBA Supply Chain Modeling

2. Data Collection

To start with the project, you requested some data from MaveriCo. MaveriCo believes that the demand might be related to a city’s population, or relates to the number of years it stayed in the city, or both. Based on this assumption, they provided some data shown in Table 1 for the demand information across a number of cities.

Apparently, you want to check whether MaveriCo’s assumption is correct and use your findings to figure out the potential demands for the cities in the Kingdom of Square. Table 2 presents the name, population, and the coordinates for each city.

Your also checked with Kii Supplies about its preferred location for the warehouse. Kii Supplies agreed to set up its warehouse based on the last digit of your student number as shown in Table 2. For example, if the last digit of your student number is ‘5’, Kii Supplies will set up its warehouse in Edofield. Kii Supplies also recommended a transport company that could manage the inbound and outbound logistics for you. The quoted transport price is $0.005/component/unit distance traveled for inbound logistics (i.e., from Kii Supplies to

Table 1: Demand information across a number of cities.

your assembly facilities), and $0.01/product/unit distance traveled for outbound logistics (i.e., from your assembly facilities to the cities).

Table 2: Population and coordinates for each city.

To set up an assembly facility, it will cost you $100,000 per facility. You will need to take this into consideration when you choose your assembly sites and design your distribution network. To facilitate your work, you were advised to focus on the first year for the operations in the Kingdom of Square.

3. The Task

You believe by now you have got all the required data and you are ready to start. Your task will need you to use the knowledge acquired in this course, explain the rationale behind your chosen approaches, document your analysis, and present your results to the management team of MaveriCo.

The following list offers some ideas for you to think further (remember this is not an exhaustive list):

• What will be the demand for each city for the year to come?
• In which cities should you set up the assembly facilities?
• How should the ten cities be served by the assembly facilities?
• What tradeoffs should be considered?

You should build models for this project in an Excel spreadsheet, which will need to be submitted as part of this assessment item. With proper model building, you can complete this project in a stage-wise manner.

Please round demand information to the nearest integer (consider using the ROUND function in Excel), and keep two decimal points for the distances and currencies.

4. Suggested Structure for Report

The report, which should be around 2,500 words (+/- 10%), should clearly discuss the findings based on the modeling of the supply chain to be designed. The following is a suggested structure for the report for 7108IBA, with approximate suggested word count for each section. Remember this is not a definitive structure for the course, but just a suggestion.

• Introduction/Background. (200 to 400 words). Covers the background of the project at hand and builds towards explaining the relevance and context of the project to be solved.
• Approach and Rationale. (400 to 600 words). A brief coverage of how you intend to solve the project and why you choose these approaches (within the course content) to solve it.
• Presentation and Analysis of Results. (600 to 1,000 words). This is the place to present your results and analyze what these results are telling you from a supply chain perspective. You may want to effectively use tables and figures (and other means) in this part. If you do so, do not forget to explain the tables/figures/etc in the text.
• Discussion. (500 to 700 words). This is where you discuss what you have found and relate it back to supply chain modeling in general. For example, what could possibly be the case if the parameters are changed slightly (e.g., due to inaccurate estimation of assembly site fixed cost)? What challenges would you envisage for supply chain modeling tasks like this project?
• Conclusions. (200 to 400 words). What conclusions can you draw from what you have found out, both from the project and from the techniques used to solve the project?
• References. References are not Include necessary references if you find them useful in supporting your report, especially the discussion part. They should be formatted correctly and consistently. You can refer to the referencing site from the library which has a comprehensive coverage of how to reference (https: //www.griffith.edu.au/library/study/referencing)
• Excel spreadsheet. Upload your Excel spreadsheet together with your report submission. This should be uploaded at the same time when you upload the report. The submission point supports multiple files submission.