Introduction: (Major Facts)
Ever since Wal-Mart started it has taking off not only nationally but internationally, especially over the past ten years. Wal-Mart has become the world’s largest and probably the most powerful retailer to this day, having the highest sales per square foot. The major keys to Wal-Mart’s success is due to their inventory turnover, operating profits, providing discounted prices to their customers, and of course their supply chain. Through all of those, Wal-Mart says that it focuses on change, technology, and effective management to lower cost all across the board. Wal-Mart’s incredible supply chain, as shown in the case with its seafood, but with all of its products is where most of their ability to lower product …show more content…

Another action that Kumar took was to monitor the inventory levels of his fish products in the 35 Wal-Mart Distribution Centers and 1,820 Super Centers that he supplied, and made shipments to the distribution centers in time for Wal-Mart to replenish its inventory in the super centers and to prevent stock-outs. Using technology to make the operation almost run itself, also cutting more cost in the long run. In class we had talked about how in supply chain one thing that should always be experimented with is change. Next in the options, the case went over decisions that Kumar looked into, and that’s what you have to be doing, it probably should have been done more here. Of course only said in the case, prices were compared from Alaska to China to process the fish, but that’s only two options, I would have looked into a lot more than that.
Options: (Choice and Rationale)
According to the article, the options seemed to be pretty cut and dry. First being to ship the fish to china to get processed and then shipped back to the United States. The second would be to process the fish in Alaska, but there were two primary disadvantages to this approach.
1. “The average labor rate per processing employee per month in Alaska was roughly 2,000 verses in China it was only $200,”
2. “The fishin’ company used the same processor in China for many different types of fish, which came from different parts of the world