Limited Brands and its Supply Chain

2) Since the first Limited store opened back in 1963, the business grew rapidly, yet there were operational problems behind the scenes. The main issues dealt with the supply chain management, which was evident in the logistics disaster of 400 merchandise trailers showing up at a distribution center parking lot designed to hold only 150. This catastrophe was an immediate result of bad planning systems and lack of proper communication between different segments of the enterprise; no one had knowledge of where the inventory came from and where it was headed to. Another crucial incident that lead to problems revolved around the fact that Limited Brands acquired a number of companies to grow in size, and in doing so, it acquired a number of information systems with hundreds of applications running on a variety of platforms. Thus, supply chain information was not easily transferred between applications, which is a crucial step in properly managing the supply chain. These problems all served to negatively impact the business, particularly in slowing down the supply chain process, which inevitably leads to unhappy customers.

3) The main management problems deal with the lack of communication between the various departments in the firm. Not a single person knew of the origin of the inventory nor where it was headed to, and this is a significant issue that must be dealt with in order to run an efficient business. The organizational problems deal with the lack of communication again, in addition to the fact that most of the managers do not agree on the same methods that should be implemented for the good of the company. The technology problems were the various information systems that were used in the variety of companies that were acquired by Limited Brands and the fact that they were not integrated into one centralized system. Instead, they were all kept as separate entities, which only leads to redundancies and the inability to transfer information from one system to another efficiently.

4) To address these problems, Limited Brands decided to upgrade its supply chain and eliminate the numerous information systems that only complicated the infrastructure. The company tried to increase sales, increase flexibility in responding to customers’ needs, and free up employees so they can better address sales issues, as opposed to focusing on the supply chain and logistics. Several cross-functional projects were launched to increase the credibility of the brands’ new mission, such as the building of regional dock centers to direct products to stores at a cheaper cost and in a shorter amount of time. This way, managers had more time to make decisions on what products to reorder. Limited Brands also contracted to Tibco Software the development of a global application integration platform to improve the company’s ability to track and manage the flow of information throughout the global supply chain. The resulting assessment revealed issues with scheduling and processing of delays, which was attributed to the simplistic point-to-point infrastructure. To improve this, different application programming interfaces were needed, so that changing one API would result in a chain reaction that required changes in all APIs in the connected applications. Real-time reporting and communications with delivery agents were also established, in addition to the integration of the outbound supply chain accountability and reporting (OSCAR) application with the logistics application. Thus, real-time communications and enhanced shipment tracking came about. Limited Brands united all its brands’ technology operations under a single central entity, namely Limited Technology Services. Further technological improvements included using a reusable framework for the replication of software solutions and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) deployment. Web-based demand and supply chain management tools were also adopted. In terms of management and organization, supply chain management was brought closer to the boardroom so the corporate level would be aware of the supply chain concerns, which helped in contributing to the overall corporate strategy, in addition to helping in costs, quality, and customer satisfaction.