A Grocery Delivery Business

Question 1: You are designing a grocery delivery business. Via the Internet, your company will offer staples and frozen foods in a large metropolitan area and then deliver them within a customer-defined window of time. You plan to partner with two major food stores in the area. What should be your competitive priorities and what capabilities do you want to develop in your own core and support processes?

In order to establish an online grocery delivery business there are few factors that need to be considered in order for this business to be successful.

The first one of them is the partnership with the grocery stores. In this case we will partner with two brick and mortar grocery stores that currently do not have any type of grocery delivery business. Further we must be certain that we will have customers who are willing to pay the extra dollars for the service. The ideal customer for this service is a person who leads an extremely hectic and busy life, does not like visiting grocery stores and has a medium to high income.

Furthermore we must also determine what our competitive priorities are. Competitive priorities are critical dimensions that any business supply chain must satisfy for its customers (Ward, 1998). Some of these competitive priorities are:

1- Cost importance- Corporations and manufacturers are concerned with how much certain processes will cost because this can make or break the differentiator factor with the competition. Manufacturing cost-related categories include (direct) production costs, productivity, capacity utilization, and inventory reduction (Ward, 1998).

2- Quality importance. Engineering, marketing, and manufacturing functions have often been portrayed as possessing different definitions of quality (Ward, 1998). These include performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, and perceived quality.

3- Delivery time importance. On-time delivery is the ability to deliver according to a promised schedule. In the online grocery business this factor is key for superior competitiveness. The business unit may not have the least costly nor the highest quality product, but is able to compete on the basis of reliably delivering products when promised (Ward, 1998).

In designing a grocery delivery business via internet, the manager of the company should focus on developing an effective operational strategy for closing the gap between competitive priority and capabilities (Collier & Evans, 2009). In addition, and one other important dimension of the online grocery delivery process is the method of order fulfillment. There three methods to choose from, picking up from the store shelf; picking from the store's fulfillment center or picking from a permanent dedicated distribution center. Depending on the location where the two partners have their local distribution centers will determine which method we may choose.

Finally, the corporation must invest in a robust and reliable information technology system as well as a great IT department. After all, all the orders will be coming through online and the web and this is extremely important for the process. Customers will rely on this system and if it fails then they will not come back to place orders and business will be lost.

References:

Collier, David A.; James R. Evans (2009). Operations Management: Goods Services and Value Chains, 2nd ed., South-western College Pub

Competitive priorities in operations management

Ward, Peter TView Profile; McCreery, John KView Profile; Ritzman, Larry PView Profile; Sharma, Deven. Decision Sciences29. 4 (Fall 1998): 1035-1046.

Question 2: Is it possible for a project to have more than one critical path? Discuss the implications of such a situation with respect to each of the following aspects:

Yes it is possible to have more than one critical path in a project. It is certainly not the ideal setting but it may happen. If there is more than one critical path then for the project manager and his/her team this means that they may less resources and more diversion.

* Project risk: having more than one critical path means that the risks for the project will definitely increase. If a project has more than one critical path due to the same duration, and then the level of project risk increases. Completion of the entire project could be delayed by delaying activities along any one of the critical paths. For example, a project consisting of two activities performed in parallel that each requires three days would have each activity critical for a completion in three days (Hendrickson, 2008). In other words a delay in one path may compromise