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| At YCH, Hong Kong |
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| YCH, an established Singapore logistic firm that started in 1955 commenced operations in Hong Kong in 1997, and currently has 3 major warehouses spread across the country. Of the 3 warehouses, we visited the newest site at Tsuen Wan, an suburb in Hong Kong near the border of Shenzhen – the latest addition to YCH. Formerly a warehouse owned by Canon Hong Kong, YCH has just recently inked a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) deal where the entire Canon-HK logistics is outsourced to YCH completely. Everything from Canon printers, large industrial-use photocopy units, and even Canon camera lenses which are shipped from Japan are packaged and distributed across Hong Kong via YCH. To tailor for the English and Cantonese speaking Hong Kong citizens, YCH is also responsible for the printing and packaging of English/Chinese user manuals and warranty cards into the retail boxes before they distributed out to the shops and malls. To enable a cost effective solution for Canon-HK and YCH itself, YCH made use of their own in-house built suite of supply chain solutions
• Intribution™ (raw materials management to support manufacturing)
• Retrogistics™ (service and returns management)
• Intrabution™ (consumer goods distribution)
Together with these 3 software solutions combined, we saw that YCH had a complete real-time overview of their current, required and projected inventories in the warehouse, as well as inventory levels from Canon Japan. This way, they employ an almost JIT (Just-in-time) approach together with Canon Japan, thereby minimizing inventory holding costs etc. In addition, YCH’s suite also have the capability to check for the authenticity of goods that arrive, and goods requesting for warranty services – thereby also eliminating any false warranty claims and thus, saving Canon of any repair cost that was not required to be honoured.
This is only, but one example of how the successful integration of IS and OM can help companies to work together effectively and efficiently. And together with the rising importance of companies matching to SLAs (Service-level agreements) in BPO/BPR deals, it goes to highlight again that technology per se is not sufficient, but coupled with the domain knowledge of operations management, the fusion of both knowledge can give rise to attainable ROIs which organizations today seek.
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Phoon Kai-Ming, Kelvin
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B.Sc Information Systems Management, 2003 Pioneer Batch |
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