Tire Supply Chain Evaluation Essay

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Bridgestone Americas

The ability for a company to align its overall business strategy with all other aspects and operations within the functions of a corporate organization is the underlying challenge for leaders to overcome. The cohesiveness of an organization is reflected in its ability to seamless intertwine complex and delicate parts and pieces together to form a competent force that is designed to compete in tough and competitive markets. All business strategy should eventually examine its ability to create a competitive advantage within that industry by being efficient, economic and most importantly extremely effective.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the Bridgestone North America company for its demonstration of the synthesis between supply chain management and business management. This examination will investigate several key aspects about this company that explicitly show how change and improvement may be a directly resulted from a modification and alignment between these aspects of the company. The challenges of these interactions will also be explored for their impact on the exchange while the financial considerations will also be explored to highlight the economic approach of the company itself. This essay will also describe a best practices situation that highlights the importance and significance supply chain management has on the overall success of failure of the organizations' mission and approach to gaining a substantial edge in their markets.

Background Information: Bridgestone Americas

Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations LLC is a developer manufacturer and marketer o of tires for sales in Canada, United States and Latin America. Bridgestone offers their tires through dealers and retailers. The company is headed in Nashville TN. Bridgestone was founded by Shojiro Ishibashi, whose name means "stone bridge. The company originated in Japan and through an evolution of over 100 years a division has been created in TN to facilitate the organizations corporate functions.

Bridgestone is heavily dependent upon its supply chain and logistics management to determine their success for the business. Bridgestone requires many suppliers and codependents in order to make their business run smooth and efficient. This type of complexity can be mitigated with the proper application of supply chain logistics management specifically and properly applied to Bridgestone. According to the organization's website: "At Bridgestone, our dream is to become a truly global enterprise and to establish the Bridgestone brand as the undisputed world No. 1 brand in both name and substance. Across the globe, our entire team is focused on achieving this goal."

Bridgestone's Strategy

Before identifying and aligning the proper supply chain ideas and principles to this company it is necessary to fully comprehend and understand the overall corporate strategy. The importance of this guiding vision helps to illuminate all problems and solutions that may emanate from confusion and complex situations that are sure to arise from the turbulent and troublesome markets that provide leaders of organizations such as Bridgestone the challenges that they face.

According to their corporate website their mission is simple and direct; "Serving Society with Superior Quality." This corporate mission, is quite vague and may cause problems for those who need more direction and detail in their contributions to the team. This is why this mission is set upon several key foundations:

1. Integrity and Teamwork

2. Creative Pioneering

3. Decision-Making Based on Verified, On Site Observations

4. Decisive Action Through Planning

Contained within that wording are simple and direct inspirations and commands that can direct managers and employees at all level the most direct and simple path to serving society with superior quality. The notions of "superior" and "society" suggest that a certain corporate responsibility is warranted and that Bridgestone can live up to it through their various means including supply chain management techniques.

Importance of Supply Chain Management

An organization's supply chain is unique and coordinated with the organizations unique and special brand or approach to business. In this case the overall strategic aims of Bridgestone suggests that supply chain management should resemble superior quality service. Inherent within that mission are subjective ideas that push the management in one direction or another. Balancing the supply chain with these aims is difficult and can not be easily explained in simple words and expression. Often times supply chain management success are felt in at different levels and at different times by different people throughout the organization. Each piece of the logistics puzzle must be aligned however with the proper underlying approach.

Risk is a very important factor dealing with supply chain principles. Logistics managers will only be as successful as they are keen on pointing out reasonable and appropriate risk. This is difficult and may require a constant juggling of ideas and priorities depending on the nature of the risk. "Managing supply-chain risk is difficult because individual risks are often interconnected.

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As a result, actions that mitigate one risk can end up exacerbating another. Consider a lean supply chain. While bare-bones inventory levels decrease the impact of over-forecasting demand, they simultaneously increase the impact of a supply chain disruption. Similarly, actions taken by any company in the supply-chain can increase risk for any other participating company, " (Chopra & Sodhi, 2012).

The New Demands Of Supply Chain Management

Supply chain managers have played a large role in creating needs for technology to improve systems and correct inefficient behavior when applicable. Technology is one tool that places new demands on the art and science of supply chain management. It appears this new paradigm has placed added burdens on the logistical aspect of the supply chain. The ability to commercially trade and exchange goods and services comes at a cost when considering the logistical aspects of such global and complex networks of buying and selling. The mere growth of global net worth suggests that the rate of international trade ushers in a new global economic framework.

Despite the global implications of the new supply chain demands, a practical and reasonable approach to these challenges is called for and can be applied with temperance when the right factors are ultimately identified for examination. "Supply Chain management is aimed at examining and managing Supply Chain networks. The rationale for this concept is the opportunity (alternative) for cost savings and better customer service. An important objective is to improve a corporate's competitiveness in the global marketplace in spite of hard competitive forces and promptly changing customer need," (Janiver-James, 2012).

The new demands of the supply chain can definitely be felt at Bridgestone. The economic culture of the planet relies much on auto mobile transportation. The oil and gas industry is directly hooked to the ability for cars and autos to create an impact in the market. Considering all the sub-markets that are involved in the mammoth supply chain industry of the oil and gas industry, it is only one aspect of Bridgestone's landscape.

Bridgestone's ability to negotiate problems within the new supply chain paradigm are complicated by environmental matters which places new demands on sustainability and green production. While the exact specifics of these concepts are not fully understood across varying industry, there is consent amongst extant literature on this subject. Hoejmose et al. (2012) explained that supply chain management must have a fundamental understanding of "green" and sustainable operations when dealing in their systems. They wrote "Green" initiatives have often been the subject of B2C supply chains, but increasingly this is becoming an important issue for B2B supply chains, since business consumers are increasingly demanding sound "green" performance from their suppliers."

The good news is that this challenge can be interwoven with Bridgestone's overall business strategy and greenness can be used as a corporate environmental strategy to actually improve their standing. "Increasing institutional and technical pressures have caused enterprises to expand their focus into greening their organizations. Organizational greening efforts need to be balanced with organizational economic performance. Simultaneously, individual enterprises have become members of a large network of enterprises, evolving from independent operations to integrated supply chain strategies. These organizational relationships have also seen a gradual shift to improved collaboration and integration with supply chain partners. Over the past couple decades, these supply chain and environmental concerns within green supply chain management (GSCM) has evolved as an important strategy for manufacturing enterprises and their supply chains to improve their overall performance and competitive stance." (Zhu et al. 2012).

Bridgestone's Supply Chain Approach

In is necessary to examine how Bridgestone conducts its supply chain management in order to evaluate its need to change and possible avenues of approach for improving the systems that are in place. The ability for this supply chain approach to successfully resonate with the base strategy source is instrumental in the organizations success and both are dependent on clear and reasonable resolution with one another. Bridgestone elects to enforce quality as a motivating factor in explaining their activities through the supply chain.

Bridgestone has effectively broken their supply management system into 5 different components, each with their own special and unique place within the larger scheme of operation. They are listed as follows:

Assessing Needs

Planning and Development

Raw Material Procurement

Production

Sales….....

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