Your Position: Vice President, Purchasing
You have recently been appointed vice president in charge of purchasing for a large manufacturing company. The company has 20 plants all located in the Midwest. Historically, the company has operated in a highly decentralized fashion with each of the plant managers encouraged to operate with only minimal control and direction from the corporate office. In the area of purchasing, each of the purchasing executives who report to the plant manager does the purchasing for his or her plant with little or no coordination with other purchasing executives. They employ procedures that are far from standardized.
Your position was created when it became apparent to the president that the company was likely to face increasing difficulty in securing certain essential raw materials. In order to protect the company against this possibility, the present haphazard decentralized arrangement should be abandoned or at least modified to meet the current problems.
You were chosen for the position because of your extensive background in corporate purchasing with another firm that operated in a much more centralized fashion. Your appointment was announced in the last issue of the company magazine. You are anxious to get started, particularly since the peak buying season is now only three weeks away. A procedure must be established which will minimize the likelihood of serious shortages and also achieve the economics associated with the added power of centralized purchasing. You must decide how to go about creating this new, centralized purchasing procedure.
Questions:
Please submit your answers in no more than two pages in word doc format, double spaced. Use the DMFL templates to select an approach.
Read through the DMFL files and Situational Key to select an approach. (DMFL templates and Situational Key are uploaded in the order)
1 – What approach would you recommend to make this decision? Do not submit the entire table, just list the L&H series for both TD and DD table, and then state which of the two approaches you would recommend and explain in a few short sentences how you arrived at your recommendation.
2 – Name three possible biases that we have covered in class in this case and steps you might take to not let them affect your decision. Be succinct.
3 – Questions below are not related to the mini case above but to your personal decision making. We are looking for brief but thoughtful analysis, similar to what we covered in class going over the individual profile.
– Comment on your individual leadership profile you obtained. What characteristics of your leadership style stood out to you?
– What lessons did you take away from the survey and the feedback?
– How might this impact your own decision making approach going forward?
