Mitacs Business Strategy Internship

Today, decisions on which products continue in the product line even when it’s near its end of the lifecycle are arbitrary and often made intuitively based on gut feelings. This could incur serious and unnecessary financial loss, and also means the decision is made in a mostly qualitative fashion and doesn’t include as much quantitative rigor as is possible. This is when the ‘Style Retirement’ and ‘Inventory Management’ project comes into play. The significances of the projects are listed below:
• Improved agility – having a model to quickly iterate forecast supply/demand will allow the company to respond to market conditions/opportunities quickly, leading to increased sales and less waste/obsolescence;
• Understanding the magnitude of the cost of the current inventory obsolescence execution will help drive the impetus for change. Currently, we are deceiving ourselves in how we price products near liquidation and don’t gradually increase discounting to reflect the true relative value of a product. Consequently, the products then get liquidated at a huge discount which leads to lost revenue that could have been captured;

Faculty Supervisor:

Gregory Zaric

Student:

Partner:

Pixie Mood

Discipline:

Business

Sector:

Manufacturing

University:

The University of Western Ontario

Program: