Research On Inventory Improvement Of Customized Business At Company AIMS

From a supply chain management standpoint, material management is one of vital coordinating factors in current enterprise management, especially for manufacturing companies. It balances the conflicting objectives of marketing, production and finance by managing the flow of material. This means balancing the resources of the company with the demand. However, with the prosperous development of the global economy, the market demand gradually becomes diversification; customers have more demands on customized products that lead to fierce competition, shorter product life cycle, various product types, smaller batch quantity and etc. The enterprises must adjust the strategy to face such a series of new challenges and deal with the uncertainty of demand and supply which will increase inventory risk.AIMS is one of manufacturing companies of Group A, which manufactures and operate part of group brands in Shenzhen. Group A bought a new German brand named BGM gear motors in year 2011. To save the cost of production and transportation, AIMS takes the business part of its Chinese market. High applicability leads to BGM business has multi product types. To cater to customized demand, AIMS prepares lots of raw material, components and semi-finished goods to shorten the lead time to customers. But parallel to this, AIMS has to invest more on inventory management that only BGM brand occupies 30%-40% of overall inventory cost.For the inventory problems of BGM business, the following aspects are the main content and problems to be solved.First of all, the establishment of the customer demand information system is discussed under mass customization production mode. By improving the framework of product BOM dominated by product category, product material will be divided into common parts and special parts. Then a certain proportion can be given to master production schedule, a more accurate material requirements planning will be generated.The purchasing replenishment model is studied secondly under mass customization. Procurement of BGM business is rely on oversea market mainly at present, which needs longer lead time and more expensive freight. Frequent delivery for instable customer demand is a problem needs to be taken into consideration. Under this circumstance, improvements on economic order quantity (EOQ) are the main solutions to be discussed.Finally, considering on current motor market and enterprise strategy, a suggestion is raised that enterprise should adjust purchasing tactic by transferring foreign procurement gradually to the domestic procurement and in-house production, for the reason that to reduce inventory management cost and to increase market flexibility.Through the research, main purposes are to provide theories of inventory management under mass customization, to provide an available option of proper material requirement plan, to set an example of inventory management optimization under mass customization for the enterprises and to help enterprises successfully implement mass customization production.