Research Of Company B's Smart Phone Supply Chain Inventory Management From A Product Lifecycle Perspective

With the development of society and technology,smart phone has already become quite necessary for human life.The smart phone industry,which company B belongs to,has become a key contributor to global economy and manufacturing industry.In order to meet the customized requirements and fierce market competition,the smart phone industry shows the characteristic of short life-cycle period,tremendous demand with large fluctuation,and very complex and multi-layered supply chain.Due to those characteristics,even though company B is the leading model in supply chain management,its inventory in the supply chain still always remain high through various life-cycle periods,and showing different problems in each period.So,to optimize the supply chain inventory management strategy and method in various life-cycle periods,is an important issue to better improve the supply chain performance and competitiveness of company B.This essay briefly analyze and introduce the smart phone supply chain first,and make summary of the existing theories and research on inventory management and life cycle period.Then based upon those theories and the actual situation of company B's supply chain inventory management model,analyzed the systematic and periodical reasons for company B's high inventory along the supply chain.And then analyze and deep dive the optimization strategies for company B's inventory management as below:Firstly,systematic problem optimization.Company B has systematic problems of inventory management including multi-layered and complex supply chain with limited resource for inventory management,lack of coordination and cooperation along the supply chain,low information transfer efficiency.To solve the problem,could use the AHP method with experts' experience to judge the priority of various modules,components in various life-cycle periods,to ensure always the focus with limited resource;then,based on the CPFR concept,could re-structure the inventory management process of company B;on top of those,company B could use the supply chain management IT systems to improve the information transfer efficiency;all those methods could solve the systematic problems of company B's supply chain inventory management.Secondly,periodical problem optimization.With the ramp in growing period,the major problem is the risk of actual demand short to forecast and leading to high inventory or even dead inventory,we could mainly use the newsvendor model to judge the more reasonable pre-build quantity,and then related stakeholders themselves could use exponential smoothing method to adjust the expectation of demand to give some pre-alert to supply chain,those could both reduce the high risk of inventory;for the problems in mature period,could use the buy &sell model to control some under-table transaction and related forecast distortion,and by using lean improvement and manufacturing data trace system,we could reduce the production lead time and safety stock level accordingly,which can help reduce the supply chain inventory in this period;for the declining period,focuses more on how to prevent the dead inventory,how to confirm the liability of company B and how to help dispose those inventory along the supply chain.All those systematical and periodical optimization methods and strategies has been implemented in company B's inventory management,and already showed to be effective to improve company B's inventory management performance in various life-cycle periods.And those strategies,concepts,methods could all be good examples for inventory management in other similar industries to smart phone.And the life-cycle period perspective is innovative and makes integrity.