Answer

1. Logistics – Transportation
1. Estimate location for FOUR new Distribution Centers (one for each Region).

The four new distribution centers identified using the qualitative estimate of DC location are the Northeast region, Midwest region, South region, and West region. Chicago is the nationwide fulfillment that serves all the four regional distribution centers. It is located on Latitude 41.88 and longitude 87.63. The location for the Northeast region is latitude 48.95 and longitude 98.1. Location for Mideast region is latitude 14.35 and longitude 121. Location for South and West regions is latitude 49.09 and 49.86, and longitude 49.86 and 50.54 respectively.

1. Six options for shipping goods — five modes plus intermodal makes six.

Table 1: Assessment of the six shipping options (Education, 2018)

An analysis of the findings in table 1 justifies the need to use truck, air and intermodal options for shipping goods to the identified locations around the USA. Out of the three options, air would be the most preferable for rapid deliveries. Nonetheless, air transport is the expensive thus when shipping in bulk, intermodal option would be the best because of the lower costs and higher speed compared to using trucks.

1. Modal selection from the Port-of-Entry to each of the Distribution Centers. 

Goods from Africa will be transported through water. They will enter the San Diego distribution center in the Northeast region through the Port of New York. The goods from Asia will enter the Northeast region through Detroit as the preferred port of entry using air as the most suitable mode of transport. Goods from Africa will enter the Midwest region through Los Angeles as the most suitable port of entry and moved via air to the distribution center in Chicago. The same region will receive inventories from Asia via the Los Angeles port using water transport. The goods will be transported to the Chicago distribution center. The South Region will receive goods through the Chicago as the primary port of entry for raw materials from Africa. The materials will be transported using water transport. The raw materials from Asia will pass through the New York port of entry via Air. For the West region, the port of entry will be Dallas and Los Angeles for African and Asian inventories respectively. The goods will be transported using air transport and moved to the distribution center in New York.

1. Computation of Initial Estimate for demand-centric location based on the current demand as allocated to each region.

1. Supply Chain Management:
1. A single key supplier and a single key customer for your product, including a brief description of their product.

HP is the single key supplier. Their product is laptop. They can be contacted via the [email protected]. Citi Banks Group is the single key customer for ACME’s products. The particular products are laptops and their accessories. The company can be reached via mail.

1. Identify the proper type of business relationship that your company should have with the supplier and customer from Part A, above, then briefly describe the data that you would share with them.

ACME should maintain a business type of relationship with both HP and Citi Banks Group. Both the suppliers and customers require different sets of data. The customers require data on voice assistant IoT Add-on Box, their SKU’s, cost per unit. They could also be interested in accessing information on annual sales and average sales made by ACME Corporation (Wisner, 2016; Cooper, 2017). On the other hand, the suppliers might be interested in information such as purchase order costs, cost to process order, delivery dates, lead time and date of orders.

1. Timeline listing each of the six SCOR processes in the order that you recommend implementation

1. The four enablers of supply chain management, and recommendation of a single technology enhancement for your company to implement in the near future.

The four enablers of the supply chain management (SCM) system are the containers, air carbines, sea transport, and rail. The respective technology enhancements for each of the enablers are truckers for the containers, sea transport, and rail while air carbines uses ICT technology enhancement. The single technology enhancement to implement in future is by adopting advanced ICT capabilities that will enable ACME to catch up with the emerging and more sophisticated SCM needs (Chiarini & Vagnoni, 2017). The new technology should work with virtual reality and Internet of Things to improve the management of supply chain.