explore the Amazon.com website. (Note that Mexican students are welcome to explo
ID: 366956 • Letter: E
Question
explore the Amazon.com website. (Note that Mexican students are welcome to explore Amazon.mx website.) In particular, pull down the Departments (Departmentos) menu in the upper left corner of the home page and choose a category of products (e.g. Electronics).
Provide an overview of how Amazon makes use of supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) applications to deliver a product from your selected category to an online customer. Be sure to focus on the business processes involved and the data that needs to be coordinated/integrated across processes.
Explanation / Answer
Amazon has invested heavily in to logistics and distribution. From 48 hours delivery to same day delivery and to evening delivery now, it has consistently broken all benchmarks of customer services.
It has more than 100 warehouses all across US and the warehouses are coming closer to the residential areas thereby reducing lead time to deliver. While ordering a product , the website synamically links it to the nearest warehouse. As soon as an order is placed, it triggers an order in the warehouse, the product is withdrawn from the racks , comes to the picking packing line, gets packed and shipped via UPS or blue dart.
For pulling out such a supply chain with devastating accuracy, it requires a lot of investment in back end infrastructure- warehouses, seemless connectivity, links with order taking software, product withdrawl from racks and finally packing and shipping. Amazon has invested and consistently investing in Supply Chain billions of dollars to ensure that it further reduces lead time. For categories such as grocery, it is even using "predictive analysis" to auto generate orders based on previous purchases. Use of drones to reduce lead times, registering Amazon as a shipping agent and booking a full ship in bulk ( later on marketing it to suppliers on retail basis) will further reduce the lead time from China for the finished goods. This was all about the back end of the supply chain.
As far as the front end is concerned. a seemless connectivity with product categories, payments banks and merchants and resellers, is ensuring that the delivery time is further reduced. As compared to a brick and mortar retailer like Walmart, Amazon has an added advantage of using the inventory of resellers for faster product delivery.
Hence, it is not only SCM but also continous linkages back and forth for Replenishment management, a strong control on delivery etc is ensuing that delivery times and accuracy improves further.
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