Trade Communication Plan Play N. Trade Case

¶ … Trade Communication Plan

Play N. Trade Case Study

As the largest retail game distributor world wide, Play N. Trade has a lot on the line in terms of how it maintains the sanctity of its brand. The company makes most of its revenue through franchising, where it is dependent on the strategic relationship between its business partners to maintain brand integrity and customer respect. In order to best maintain the brand integrity, members of Play N. Trade find themselves tied to supervising their franchisees in order to ensure that quality of service and products remain high. This takes up a lot of time, effort, and resources on behalf of Play N. Trade. Approval for product acquisition must then slowly climb up a hierarchal chain, which often creates a lag in getting the product out to consumers. Adjusting its just-in-time system to a vendor managed inventory may help speed up product acquisition times, along with adopting performance management structures to guide future relationships.

The way the product is distributed must be adjusted. Currently, Play N. Trade uses a 3rd party logistics provider and freight forwarder in order to distribute games to other retailers and directly to customers. The company works with huge retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy. Play N. Trade uses a just-in-time system that does not keep a stock of inventory on hand in order to speed up the distribution process. Rather, the just-in-time system used by Play N. Trade only provides products when and as they are ordered. This has been beneficial to the organization, as lower stocks of inventory have allowed for freer capitol to not be tied down in product. This has helped the organization expand into the global giant it is. However, there are several major issues with the just-in-time system in regards to the current desire to reduce the length of time in the product acquisition process. The company now has a goal of reducing this time to one week or less. Yet, using the just-in-time system will not work with such ambitious goals. As such, there are clear lags in the system that makes it almost impossible to reach the week minimum time for product acquisition.

There are several other recommendations to the company that may help them reach their goals. First, the company should try to incorporate more principles of vendor-managed inventory models. This would allow the vendors to take more control over inventory stocks, thus freeing up Play N. Trade from babysitting over them. Such an implementation will strengthen the relationship between good vendors and weed out the ones that would otherwise be too much of a hassle in regards to keeping brand quality high. This can be accompanied with a performance-based management system, where the highest performing vendors are given more power and responsibility within the product distribution and acquisition process. This would ultimately streamline the process and allow Play N. Trade to stop micromanaging the situation so much that it creates lags within the supply chain. Play N. Trade must align itself "strategically, prepare its people, set up good communications processes, recognize that there will be risks to be managed, and put in place a framework for measuring performance" (Reed & Carter 1). Performance rules and guidelines can be a way to streamline communications and acquisitions processes without having to wait for the chain of command to approve in order to remain loyal to the brand image. If a vendor fails to show positive performance, they are removed from the chain.