1. Designing Global Supply Chain Networks exercise
Unipart, a manufacturer of auto-parts, is considering B2B marketplaces to purchase its MRO supplies. Both marketplaces or for a full line of supplies at very similar prices for products and shipping. Both provide similar service levels and lead times.
However, their fee structures are quite different. The first marketplace, parts4u.com, sells all its products with our 5 percent commission tacked on top of the price of the product (not including shipping). AllMRO.com's pricing is based on a subscription fee of $10 million that must be paid upfront for two year period and a commission of 1 percent on each transaction's product price.
Unipart spends about $150 million on MRO supplies each year, although this varies with their utilization. Next year will likely be a strong year, in which high utilization will keep MRO spending at $150 million. However, there is a 25 percent chance that spending will drop by 10%. The second year, there is a 50% chance that the spending level will stay where it was in the frost year and a 50% chance that it will drop by another 10%. Unipart uses a discount rate of 20%. Assume all costs are incurred at the beginning of each year (so year 1 costs are incurred now and year 2 costs are incurred in a year). From which B@B marketplace should Unipart buy its parts?
2. Demand Forecasting in a Supply Chain exercise
Weekly demand figures of hot pizza are as follows:
Week Demand ($)
1 108
2 116
3 118
4 124
5 96
6 119
7 96
8 102
9 112
10 102
11 92
12 91
Estimate demand for the next 4 weeks using a 4 week moving average as well as simple exponential smoothing with a = 0.1. Evaluate the MAD, MAPE, MSE, bias and TS in each case. Which of the two methods do you prefer? Why?