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Kudler Fine Foods Operations Management

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Kudler Fine Foods (KFF) was founded by Kathy Kudler in the San Diego metropolitan area in 1998. Kathy developed a business plan for the store due to a need for an upscale specialty food store in La Jolla. After opening KFF on June 18, 1998 and concluding a profitable year, she opened a second and third store (Kudler Fine Foods, 2008).

KFF has seen strong success and now must ensure continued growth by expanding services, improving the efficiency of operations, and increasing the consumer purchase cycle (Kudler Fine Foods, 2008). Each member of the organization must play a key role in achieving these objectives. Special attention must be paid to the supply chain and business processes, especially when developing a new product offering. …show more content…

The three departments managers are encouraged to check with the managers of the other stores to make sure the company is receiving the best price. They should combine their efforts when ordering from the organic produce suppliers. The more produce that KFF buys as a total the better the wholesale price will be. There will be more room to negotiate with larger orders and less time will be spent developing a contract and forecasting inventory.
A supply chain solution to ordering would be to invest in purchasing software set up on a network for KFF management and store managers to access at anytime. This software would allow all stores to place orders cohesively. Each store manager can see how much product is being sold in each store and compare sales. If there is an overstock in one store, managers can move inventory to another store by looking at the data on the network. Kathy can implement a Just-in-Time (JIT) system. This is the concept behind creating the firm 's product in the least amount of time (Gomez-Mejia & Balkin, 2002). Kathy and the management team will develop a smooth and integrated production process. Possibly in the future KFF can use the same type of JIT inventory systems as Wal-Mart. The inventory reorders are generated as products are scanned at check out. As soon as an items hits a certain number in stock, the information is sent to the supplier for reorder

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