Marsden Community Stores

Marsden Community Stores

Introduction to the Case

The case of Marsden Community Stores is centered around the effective and efficient management of Supply Chain of any organization. It is all about how a grocery retail store manager plans to survey the market and all the relevant factors to make a decision regarding the effective management of inventory within the story. Mary Johnson is the central character who is under an extended amount of pressure from her boss to present a compiled report for increasing competitiveness of the brand. Moreover, the different factors surveyed include the customers, suppliers and the supermarkets who are the competitors of Marsden.

Different concepts including the relative information required for an effective survey questionnaire, the importance of pilot research in the success of any business campaign, customer perception regarding the selection of a grocery store and the concepts of lean and agile approach to operations have been discussed. Looking at the overall conception of the case study, it can be seen that the grocery retail industry has indeed the most efficient form of supply chain management. Moreover, players in other industries learn a lot from the ways grocery retailers manage their inventory, reduce their prices on a daily basis and have the minimal costs while maintaining a sustainable amount of profit.

Moreover, through this case study, the Supply Chain Managers get a chance to develop concepts regarding who to survey and who to leave aside whenever business related information is required. The reason being that the case provides some really important information about how the competitors of Marsden held down on their private information and did not share it with Mary. In order to better understand about the case, an in depth discussion regarding the case study questions is required.

Question 1

In order to get a better insight of the market and the different players and factors relevant to it, Marsden's Purchasing Director Mary Johnson conducted a pilot research. Moreover, this research was directed towards the collection of information from a number of sources.

Supply Chain Orientation of the Research

The Supply Chain Orientation of the research conducted by Mary Johnson was not even near to being thorough. There were multiple reasons behind this including the following:

Questionnaire delivery to Competitors in the Supermarket Industry

Despite knowing that the competitors in the Supermarket industry would not reveal information to Marsden, Mary chose to send questionnaires to 5 of the largest players within the Supermarket Industry. What this did was that significant information was not revealed from the competitors. Moreover, this move of Mary also gave a hinting move to the competitors that Marsden was on to something new or big and was planning to launch something new into the market.

Unrealistic Questions to Customers

Undoubtedly customers are the most important of any supply chain as everything within the chain runs because of the customers. They are the players who pay for the operations of every player within the supply chain ranging from the raw material suppliers to the retailers.

However, the questionnaire that Mary had designed asks ...