Managing Operations and Processes

1 Managing Operations and Processes Witterington Garden Centre has been thriving for decades. The garden center is found on the edge of Witterington, a small market town located in the rural area of Southern England. It is family owned and run business and is strategically located in an area that benefits from its isolated location.

Inventory management refers to the process of ordering, storing, and using a company's inventory. This includes the management of raw materials, components, and finished products, as well as warehousing and processing such items. The paper considers the reasons why inventory management so important to the plant area of the garden center. There is also a need to critically evaluate the plant area inventory management described in the case and give recommendations tailored towards improving inventory management.

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2 Reasons why is inventory management so important to the plant area of the garden Centre With thousands of items and garden store's inventory, there is a need to have a simple and easy way to track the inventory. There is a lot of work going on at the planting area, and there is a sense in which inventory management can be performed by having an employee holding a handheld device and walking through the area, hence making it possible for everything to be accounted for automatically without necessarily scanning the individual items.

The inventory management should be very important as it ought to provide answers to some fundamental questions that will help stir the garden center forward. For instance, there is a need to keep information on the plant that was the best-seller, the plants that had to be dumped because of overproduction, some of the highest-selling salespersons, the customers that bought the most containers of a certain plant variety. With all this information, the garden center can forge ahead to identify the kinds of forecasts that can be made for the next year or even several years down the road.

As such, the ability to provide accurate answers to these questions starts with having a sound inventory management process. Inventory management will include counting plants and using computer programs to keep track of the information so that it can be given to the salespeople and production people (Slack and Brandon-Jones, 2018).

In the garden center plant area, there is a constant need for information. The information is used for analysis so that the center can try to keep abreast of that information ad do a better job. It makes it possible for the management to know where they are, relative to where they have been in the past, and where the plant is likely to be in the future. All these have to be tied together (Brandon-Jones, 2018).

The organization is a very important aspect of managing inventory at the plant area of the garden center. Through the organization, the garden center will be able to take into consideration what is available for sale or what is coming on for sale in the future years unless it is organized. It is necessary that anyone working at the plant area can be in a position to glean information pertaining to how many, what size, when, and the future projections (Viale & Carrigan, 1996). This is very important when it comes to doing business.

In the plant area, vital information is needed for making managerial decisions regarding sales, production, and demand trends. By maintaining up to date inventory, the problems arising from leaving plants unsold or overselling plants can be minimized. Plant inventory will provide the basis for planning the work schedules, space requirements, labor needs, and the needed supplies. The inventory data will also be used to plan for the production programs, calculate the production costs, and develop the pricing strategies (Hill & Hill, 2017).

Evaluation of the plant area inventory management as described in the case A lot of work has been done pertaining to storage and achieving some level of efficiency in the plant area. The garden center has been able to survive the changing seasons, as the cold season makes the center lose a lot of stock. The center capitalizes on the spring season, whereby a variety of plants can be incorporated into the plant area. There is adequate space that has been allocated to ensure that the plants at various stages are nourished and displayed. Every plant type has been shown off to the best advantage, and therefore the customers are in a position to scrutinize them effectively before

3 purchasing. Effective inventory management for a garden center can be better achieved when the organization has been well achieved in order to facilitate maintenance. This has been well done, making it easy to feed, weed, water, and make the plants tidy. The organization has made it possible for the staff to get some free time and help the customers at peak times, which is important for the success of the center (Heizer, Render & Munson, 2017).

The center is cognizant of the sources of supply throughout all the seasons so that there is no shortage and that the garden center can always be able to meet the demand of plants. The garden center has also been able to maintain a variety of plants in tandem with the relevant seasons. This instills confidence among the customers in the sense that they are assured of getting the seasonal plants.

Frequent stock replenishment has also been leveraged by the garden center, thus boosting inventory management. This reduces the amount of labor needed when demand is high as inventory moves from reserve storage to primary storage in good time, ready to be picked by the customers.

Conversely, the garden center has not been able to embrace flexibility in ordering, given that orders are only made on Mondays. The fluctuations in demand cannot be certainly made if the center cannot make orders during other days. Again, there are concerns that the data that is being generated is not very useful. Technology has not been adequately leveraged in ensuring effective and efficient inventory management.

Recommendations In order to optimize control in the plant area, there is a need to have an in-beat inventory management system. By being able to maintain a current and up to date plant material inventory, problems that arise from overselling or leaving the plants unsold can be taken care of.

With fluctuating demands at different times of the year, there will be a need to employ three full-time people in the inventory department. These employees need to be supported by another dozen out in the field at various times of the year and are in a position to do counts and report the information.

Another thing that will be helpful if incorporated, especially in the plant area, will include the cycle counts. This will entail an auditing procedure whereby a small subset of inventory in a specific area is counted at a given time. Orders cycle counts will be based on the activity. When there is a significant scrap or movement of plants, the need for a cycle count of that item is kicked out (Heizer, Render & Munson, 2017).

There is a need to also leverage technology in order to empower the staff and customers alike.

This will help avoid a situation where everything is supposed to pass through the central person. This results in a huge information bottleneck, and therefore everyone will be moving blindly and will not be able to see the goal ahead. With the technology in place, everyone will now be able to see what is happening, and information can be on the website for the customers to see what is there now and what is coming up.

There is a need to improve the ability to time crops and hit the ready dates with greater accuracy. This is also another area in which technology can be leveraged. The costs will be cut down

4 costs because there are no many things to be maintained on the ground as long. The ability to time crops can be expensive to maintain and is likely to waste a lot of time.

Mobile devices can help the employees make adjustments and track their plants' movement so that the office staff can also be made aware of the changes in the inventory immediately. The work orders to begin picking plants can be quickly issued, followed by the desirable response.

Maintaining an accurate sales inventory will be the most attribute of the inventory control system. There is a need for this data to be accumulated in a timely manner for it to be most effective.

The sales information can be posted with the current price information as an aid in quoting prices for the customers. The manager must adjust the plant inventory system to the situation and develop it to provide the control and information necessary to make sound managerial decisions (Ravinder & Misra, 2014).

In general, the management strategies should be tailored towards producing in the shortest time possible. For the garden center, turning crops over quickly is good for business. The management also strives to ensure that there are multiple production times and staggered potting cycles in order to ensure that the crop is always fresh. Trying to pre-sell as much as possible will also be beneficial to the garden center. Given that forecasting demand is difficult, knowing demand ahead of planting is likely to be very beneficial. In the event that the inventory management operations become a tedious task for Witterington Garden Centre, the management can consider outsourcing where it makes sense. It is no longer tenable to try and achieve everything in isolation. Strategic and mutually profitable partnerships can be an important element in effective inventory management. More so, having a contingency plan can also be helpful. There is a need for a plan B for each crop. If there is no backup plan, then there will be no need to produce that crop. In this case, the idea is to ensure that the risks are minimized.

Decisions ought to be made and reviewed for feasibility.

Reference list Heizer, J., Render, B., & Munson, C. 2017. Operations Management, 12th global ed. Harlow: Pearson.

Heizer, J., Render, B., & Munson, C. 2017. Operations Management, 12th global ed. Harlow: Pearson.

Hill, T., & Hill, A. 2017. Essential Operations Management, 2nd ed. Houndmills: Palgrave.

Ravinder, H., & Misra, R.B. 2014. ABC Analysis For Inventory Management: Bridging The Gap Between Research and Classroom. American Journal of Business Education 7(3): 257-264.

Slack, N., and Brandon-Jones, A. 2018. Essentials of Operations Management. 2nd ed. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Slack, N., and Brandon-Jones, A. 2018. Essentials of Operations Management, 2 nd ed. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Viale, J. D., & Carrigan, C. 1996. Basics of Inventory Management: From Warehouse to Distribution Center. Menlo Park, CA: Course Technology Crisp.