Team Eaton in Shanghai

Eric Doan, Andrew Martin and Susan Gao presented their project analysis to Eaton Asia Pacific top management on Wednesday, June 18 in Shanghai. Eaton Corporation is a Cleveland-based industrial firm supplying equipment to the automotive, aerospace, electrical, hydraulics and truck industries all over the world. All three projects focused on improving a different aspect of Eaton’s supply chain operations throughout the Asia-Pacific region, which includes China, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, India, Taiwan and Australia. The projects reflected the complex nature of doing business in the Asia Pacific region, where Eaton works with many small, and very dispersed suppliers and customers. Andrew’s work focused on analyzing Eaton’s spending on packaging materials for all of their plants in China. He identified several opportunities for Eaton to reduce total expenditures on packaging, and presented an approach for rationalizing packaging purchases across the entire Asia Pacific region. His analysis reflected the frustrations of many large foreign companies who operate in the region: because the vast majority of suppliers are small and scattered all over the region, it is hard to obtain economies in buying and transporting supplies and materials. Susan analyzed Eaton’s supply chain network- factories, distribution centers and supplier locations – in an effort to make the network more efficient. Her analysis focused on reducing company inventories and transport costs in the region, and she proposed that Eaton consolidate distribution center operations into three locations: Australia, Shanghai and Singapore. Eric’s work focused on creating “scorecards” for management to use in the evaluation of supplier performance and internal Eaton factory operations. Eric’s project reflected the real world nature of the Miami MBA Global Consultancy assignments: during the course of his analysis of supplier quality ratings (defects per million parts shipped) he discovered a huge decline in quality for several Chinese suppliers in the month of May. The increase in defective parts was so drastic he questioned the validity of his data until he discovered that the suppliers were all located close to the major earthquake that struck China in May!