Logistics and Transport Management

Case Study

Company XYZ: The Entertainment and Travel industry Value Chain
Company XYZ is a privately owned Entertainment and Travel Publishing House that produces a weekly Entertainment
and Travel newspaper which is all done in-house and is distributed to major retailers within Gauteng. The organisation
employs a key team of eight journalists, two editors, 3 graphic designers and an administration department consisting 25
people doing the accounts, legal and general administration work.
The current supply chain is as follows:
The Journalists identify newsworthy topics, collect the relevant data through secondary and primary data sources, the
journalist then produces an article for the Travel Newspaper using a notebook with Microsoft Word (The latest version). This
is usually written away from the office as the journalist will be at the scene or at home to complete this article within 10
hours. The journalist then emails this article to the editor who will check the quality and relevance of the article. The editor
then emails this to the legal department to ensure there are no legal issues if the article is published. The legal department
will then email this back to the editor for approval.
Once this is approved, the article is emailed to the desk top publishing department for final editing and presentation
enhancement. This is now emailed to the printing works and the newspapers are printed as per the forecast quantity. This is
now loaded onto the trucks for distribution to all the major retailers. The newspaper needs to reach all the major retailers in
Gauteng by Saturday morning before 08:00 am as the stores open.
At a logistics and supply chain meeting called by the senior management due to complaints received from the retailers
(their customers), the following issues were noted by their staff:
The journalists argued that it was difficult to identify breaking Entertainment and Travel news and did not have any
means to access this information. The mobile devices were not able to run any social media applications due the
organisation not providing the latest smartphones to them and they had to pay for their own data.
1.
The editor complained about the journalists who emailed articles to them only three days before the legal and desk top
publishing could continue with their work on the article. This editor was frustrated as 30 % of all articles submitted by
all the journalists were not well structured and had grammatical errors with different layouts per article.
2.
The legal department said that they had to spend at least three hours searching through the law library which was not
well indexed and all books were hard copies. The latest legislation and regulations were not readily available and the
had to spend at least two hours searching for this information.
3.
The desk top publishing required at least three hours to set-up and one hour per document. The system as not linked
to the current computer network in the printing department and had to be emailed there.
4.
The IT department stated that the current systems were not all linked onto the network and were mainly operating as
stand-alone computer workstations. There was a strong reliance on the need to email the article between the various
role-players in the supply chain.
5.
The Entertainment and Travel newspapers were printed and an average of 10 % of the newspapers had to be
scrapped due to machine failures and often delayed the loading of trucks who would often arrive up to two hours late
at the retailers. They at least 30 % of the delivery trucks would be delayed in traffic congestion as they did not know
about this prior to the journey.
6.
The delivery vehicle drivers had no means of communication with the main office as they were banned from talking on
their mobile phones (which were not smartphones) while driving.
7.
Due to a lack of an integrated planning system between all departments, this impacts on the logistics and supply chain
causing delays. It was reported that: 30% of the time the delivery of the Entertainment and Travel newspapers are
between four to five hours late. This results in a 10 % loss in sales revenue due to the lack of the Entertainment and
Travel newspapers being available when and where to customers need them.
8.
Answer ALL the questions in this section.
Question 1 (25 Marks)
Critically discuss how you can apply the Value Chain for Company XYZ.
Question 2 (25 Marks)
Discuss how you can apply the optimised Value Chain for Company XYZ utilising the 4th and 5th industrial revolution
technologies and platforms.
Question 3 (25 Marks)
Critically discuss FOUR (4) impacts of using the optimised value chain you have proposed for Company XYZ.
Question 4 (25 Marks)
Critically discuss how Artificial Intelligence and Data Science can be used within the Value Chain for Company XYZ.