Whirlpool Initiatives in 1990s and Early 2000s
Procurement and Product development: – Procurement was the initial step taken by Whirlpool during 1990s wherein they signed a deal with all their suppliers across the globe for manufacturing products of high quality and lower cost materials with motive to deliver best value products to its customers. Product development further helped to transfer innovative consumer solution from one part of world to another to meet the needs of consumer in diverse market
Push and Pull manufacturing:- In early 1990s “Push” manufacturing strategy was carried out effectively, since the products were pre-designed production use to happen on weekly basis but when there was any non standard order where place the production use to take four weeks. Noticing such delay in 1992 Mr. Dittman was given a responsibility of restructuring the process that came out with “Pull” strategy which helped Whirlpool to deliver products in five days instead of four weeks. With highly optimized production schedule Whirlpool not only managed to reduce the time but also predicted demand more accurately. The statistical application also changed from Distributed Resource Planning (DRP) to Reality Applied to Distributed Resource Planning (RAD) which helped Whirlpool to further to reduce the production cost and inventories of finished goods. Since “Pull” strategy didn’t matched with some of the partners and sales channel who were comfortable with “Push” manufacturing Whirlpool then came out with “Push and Pull” manufacturing to meet the requirements of global partners.
E-Initiative: – E-Initiative was introduced to reduce the cost and increase the profitability of the company. Thru E-Initiative Whirlpool concentrated on enhancement of Inventory Management, Electronic Data Interchange and Demand Management. The forecasting package help to set the inventories level at all the stores which resulted in cutting down the production cycle time and inventory level. EDI was