TheanHuat Enterprise established since 2001 is owned by Mr. OoiTheanHuat which previously known as “ChooiThoe Enterprise”. TheanHuat Enterprise is a family business which sells chili sauces, spices, and curry pastes. The idea to get started with this business is because of the Malaysian like to eat hot and spicy foods. In addition, they like to use spices in cooking their foods. So, Mr. Ooi thinks that it is a good idea to start his business with his guarantee that this business can make profit.
Main Activities
TheanHuat Enterprise manufactures spices powder, curry, sauce and paste products. Here are the examples of the products: turmeric powder, curry powder for meat and chicken, fish curry powder, briyani powder, chili sauce and chili blended.
Therefore, to produce the products, there are some similar steps have to go through with. First of all, they need toseek out the good quality of the raw materials like chilies, garlics, onions, and etc. from the suppliers. Consistency is an important factor in this step, as slight variations in raw materials’ characteristics could alter the flavour and colour of the finished product.
The workers will start preparing and process the raw materials. For example in making chilies sauce, they need to wash the chilies, peeling the garlics, onions, pulping, adding ingredients and cooking. Same and slightly different in produce spices and pastes.
After finished, next step will be fillingor sealing immediately to retain the freshness of the product. Cooling is the next step to prevent flavour loss through stack burning, which occurs when chillies stays at high temperatures after cooking is complete. Containers of chilliesmay are cooled in cold air or cold water. Lastly, labeling and packaging.Finally, the products are labelled and coded with product information, including ingredients, date and location of manufacture, and shelf-life.
Since TheanHuat Enterprise only distributes to the grocery shops as wholesales, therefore, they only pack in a large plastic bag and delivery to the grocery shops.
Firm’s Current Production and Operations Management Situations
SWOT Analysis of TheanHuat Enterprise
Strengths · Free of any preservative · Variety of curry paste mixture | Weaknesses · Lack of well-trained and skillful employees · Lack of advertising the company · Low-level of technology |
Opportunities · High demand in variety of curry paste in Malaysia | Threats · Strong competitiveness in industry |
a) No preservative
The strongest strength for TheanHuat is their products are safe to consume and free of preservative. Commonly, most of the competitors are using preservatives such as sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate in order to keep their products from bacteria, naturally decompose or become rancid. Preservatives are very useful to prolong the shelf life of a product, but if we continue intake preservatives food for a long period, it might cause a myriad of “mysterious” health problems.
Although the FDA consider these preservatives are safe to consume in a small amounts, anything more than a small amount is considered unsafe and unhealthy because the majority of the processed food we eat everyday contains the same preservatives. Moreover, it is not safe to say that we are getting small amounts when we take into account the fact we are consuming these same preservatives on a daily basis throughout our entire lives.
On the other hand, TheanHuat also avoids their product from adding nitrates in order to add flavor and maintain the colour of the curry powder because higher quantities of nitrates can be hazardous. Nitrates can also converted into nitrites during digestion and mix with hemoglobin to form a harder substance that makes it difficult for the blood to carry oxygen.
b) Variety of curry paste mixtures
Besides being free of preservative and is healthier for customers, TheanHuat Enterprise also provides a variety of curry paste mixture for their customers. The endless combinations and fresh taste make their curry become a popular dish. But, what exactly is curry? Curry paste is a blend of ground or pounded herbs, spices and other seasonings. Curry paste is primarily known as an important ingredient in Malaysian daily food. Moreover, TheanHuat Enterprise also carried out the customization system by providing a variety of mixture curry paste for their customers. A mixture of a variety of curry paste is specially blended for the requirement of each and every customer.
ü Red curry paste – Red curry paste includes red chili peppers (fresh or dried), shallots,garlic, galangal, lemon grass, coriander roots, peppercorns, salt, shrimp paste and kaffir lime leaf.
ü Green curry paste – Similar with the red curry paste, except for green chilies aoften used in place of red.
ü Yellow curry paste – Similar with red curry paste, but it is made with turmeric whereit derives its yellow colour, and occasionally yellow chili peppers.
ü Masaman curry paste – It is an Indian influenced curry, and unlike other types of curry which contains many ground dry spices as ingredients, including cumin, cinnamon, cardamom and cloves.
ü Panang curry paste –Panang curry is generally more mild than other types of curry paste.
ü Yellow curry paste – Yellow curry paste or gaengleung and sometimes also calledgaeng karee, is a mild, mellow blend with a sweet-spicy flavourbased on turmeric and curry powder blended with other herbsand spices such as coriander, cumin and lemongrass. It is used to flavour chicken dishes and fish stews.
ü Orange sour curry paste – Orange sour curry paste, also known as kreuanggaengsohm, contains the fewest ingredients of any of the curry pastes: red chillies, shallots, sea salt, turmeric and shrimp paste. The sour taste comes from the addition of soured tropical fruits such as pineapple. It is usually a water based curry used to flavour fish.
TheanHuat Enterprise acknowledges us the art of curry paste. By varying the few herbs and spices making up the curry paste, the palette of flavours of the various pastes is amazing. Through the ingredient label, we can notice that many of the same ingredients are used, yet resulting paste are far from similar if varying the proportions of ingredients, prepping them differently, deleting an ingredient, adding a new one or introducing a new twist somewhere in the process. With all this variety, it is no wonder that curry is part of the daily repast for many Malaysian.
Weakness is the poor side of the organization. Weakness of the company therefore have to be improved so that to improve the poor side to become better side. It can be seen through the operational management such lack of well-trained and skillful employees and lack of advertising. For example, TheanHuat Enterprise should employ more experienced workers in order to increase productivity and low the cost of productions so that company can earn more profits.
a) Lack of well-trained and skilful employees
Nowadays, people tend to work in service industry rather than work in manufacture industry. So, a person who works in TheanHuat Enterprise normally is those who already have some ageing or maybe housewives. These workers mostly do not know how to operate a high-tech machine. Their jobs normally focus on wash the chilies, peeling the garlics, onions, pulping, adding ingredients and cooking. Without having the knowledge in operate a machine can decrease the efficiency in production.
b) Lack of advertising the company
Due to TheanHuat Enterprise is running the business under a sole proprietorship and a small family business, the company invests less on advertising the company. Therefore, not much customer really heard of the company’s name.
c) Low-level of technology
In today’s world, technology extends our abilities to change the world. We cannot deny that technology plays an important role in our routine work, because we depend on technology to cut, shape, and put materials together, move things from one place to another and so on. Besides that, we also use technology to change the world to suits us better.
Unfortunately, the major weakness of TheanHuat Enterprise is technology. TheanHuat Enterprise is a family business and is currently running the business under a sole proprietorship. Thus, they are using low-level of technology and uncomplicated machine in the process of making spices as compared to their competitors like Adabi, Gaban and others due to the company can’t really afford to purchase complicated machine and they are lack of capital. On the other hand, with using simple machine, TheanHuat Enterprise is unable to produce their product in large amount. As a result, their operation cost was higher compared to their competitors.
Opportunity is considered as external analysis of the company. From the external environment around the company, opportunities are always exist. Opportunity is something that provide the chances to the company in order to perform so that to sustain the competitive advantage among the industries. For example, high demand in variety of curry paste in Malaysia. Therefore, it gives chances to TheanHuat Enterprise to innovate and creates more types of curry powders and mixtures to fulfill the consumers’ demands.
Threat is known as the external factor of the company. It can be something harmful to the company. For example, the competitiveness in this industry can said to be the threat to TheanHuat Enterprise. This is because there are many firms in this industry, whereby some like Baba’s, Adabi, etc. are the big firms in the spices industry. However, this threat should be overcome and prevented so that the company can focus on important tasks.
Analyse and Evaluate the Suitable Strategies
By using supply chain technology, we think that is the most applicable strategy to solve the problems that limited the business expansion of TheanHuat. Technology helps synchronize and balance the two opposing business objectives of achieving ultimate customer service at a low cost. Most businesses want to have a very high customer service level, but they want to do so at the lowest total cost possible. Supply chain technology can help companies assess tradeoffs to meet their customer's needs, but in a way that allows them to make a profit. Supply chain planning helps dramatically increase forecast accuracy, streamline product introductions, assess promotions and create plans attuned to the market, and supply chain execution provides transportation, warehousing and inventory management to ensure cost-effective order fulfilment and on-time deliveries.Recomandations
We can concludethat technology comprised from four buckets of software, e-business technologies, visibility and productivity, and process advances, and summarized in the Table 1-1:
Technology Category | Description |
Software | Includes IT systems for activities such as forecasting, transportation, warehousing, inventory management, collaboration in order to minimize cost of production company. |
e-business technologies | Includes such technologies as automatic ship notices, EDI, web portals, electronic invoicing in order to simplify the procedure of trading. |
Visibility and productivity | Consists of technologies such as advanced bar codes, RFID, event management in order to achieve effectiveness of distribution products. |
Process advances | Includes process advances applied to the entire end to end supply chain, such as Lean, Six Sigma, collaborative planning forecasting and replenishment in order to optimize the productivity oflabour and elimination of waste the continuous improvement of operations of company. |
TheanHuat can improve the weakness of company by using four buckets technologies of software, e-business technologies, visibility and productivity, and process advances. The inclusion of process advances in the above table is not meant to lump them together with pure technology plays. In fact, we feel that processes should be addressed first, and then enabled later with software and other technology.
We believe it will be technology that clearly drives economic profit, both short term and long term, and it will be heavily influenced by the external environment. For example, if transportation costs in the long run increase much faster than overall inflation, companies will need to apply increasingly powerful technology.
If customers of the future require more choice and customization, it is safe to say that company will need to handle and react to increasingly large volumes of demand, and customize supply chain service and product solutions for domestic markets. Optimization technology will also become more prevalent, allowing firms to maximize economic profit while simultaneously considering constraints such as customer product availability requirements.
The Flow of Implementation
1. Planning—This is the strategic portion of supply chain technology. Companies need a strategy for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for their product or service. A big piece of supply chain planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that it is efficient, costs less and delivers high quality and value to customers.
2. Source—Next, companies must choose suppliers to deliver the goods and services they need to create their product. Therefore, supply chain managers must develop a set of pricing, delivery and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving the relationships. And then, supply chain managers can put together processes for managing their goods and services inventory, including receiving and verifying shipments, transferring them to the manufacturing facilities and authorizing supplier payments.
3. Make—This is the manufacturing step. Supply chain managers schedule the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging and preparation for delivery. This is the most metric-intensive portion of the supply chain—one where companies are able to measure quality levels, production output and worker productivity.
4. Deliver—This is the part that many supply chain insiders refer to as logistics, where companies coordinate the receipt of orders from customers, develop a network of warehouses, pick carriers to get products to customers and set up an invoicing system to receive payments.
5. Return—This can be a problematic part of the supply chain for many companies. Supply chain planners have to create a responsive and flexible network for receiving defective and excess products back from their customers and supporting customers who have problems with delivered products.
Conclusion
In conclusion, by implement the supply chain technology in TheanHuat Company, it is obvious that can eliminate the entire problem faced by the company. By following the steps of strategy, we strongly believe that the company will have much improvement in performance, efficiency, lower cost and so on. In order to expand then business, the company should change its current strategy due to appearance of many problems. After the new strategy being implemented, the company also need to record all the performance after changing strategy so that company can do a comparison before and after, it can maintain the performance and growth of the company and finally it can globalize its business internationally.
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