Wilkins Operations Management Case

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Jamal Mohamad 03/22/2012 Wilkins’ A Zurn Company: Demand Forecasting Wilkins Regulatory Company (Wilkins), a manufacturer of water control products, was acquired by Zurn Industries in 1971. However, as Zurn merged with U.S. Industries Bath & Plumbing Products Co. 1998, it changed its name to Jacuzzi Brands in 2003. Wilkins manufactured 12 different product lines, however, it specialized in water valves for backflow prevention and water pressure reduction products. Wilkins positioned itself as a low cost producer with innovative product design and rapid response to market needs and trends. The two main products are pressure vacuum breakers (PVBs) and fire valves. The demand forecast for the next five or six quarters was made based on current knowledge of the sales forecast, prior history new product introductions, and marketing plans. Once the forecast and sales volume had been updated, the forecast master was distributed to managers throughout the plants so that detailed plans could be created. Forecasting was very hard to estimate due to changes in the market. Weather played an important factor since they had much higher sales in the seasons of spring and summer. Since the plumbing products business is dependent upon commercial and institutional construction activities, forecasting was difficult due to macroeconomic factors such as unemployment rate and the availability of financing. There are many issues with the current forecasting method used by Wilkins. First of all, it is very hard to use and complicated. They have to do a separate forecast for each product which ends up being very time consuming. Second of all, the current forecasting method is very inaccurate. “Connors and Fields had forecasting sales of 53,560 PVB units and 559 five valve units. According to Exhibit 2, actual sales were 48,159 PVB units and 580 fire valve units”. As you can see

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