Seven Eleven Japan

540 Words3 Pages
Seven Eleven Japan is an international chain of convenience stores under the parent company of Seven & I holdings. Seven Eleven Japan, founded by Masatoshi Ito, was the leading convenience store operator in Japan in 2008 with 34.3% market share. Seven Eleven Japan has had exponential growth in terms of number of stores and revenues which can be mainly be attributed to its competitive supply chain strategy. The area dominance strategy of building a cluster of stores around a Distribution Center (DC) in a high demand area allowed it to have an efficient distribution system coupled with high brand awareness. It required all suppliers to start production based on orders from stores through a ‘pull’ system and deliver it to DC. Through a combined delivery system, DCs distributed like products from different distributors to scattered stores. The aggregation of deliveries and centralization of manufacturing facilities as well as DCs gave the benefit of capacity aggregation and helped reduce the transportation costs by reducing the number of transport vehicles. A high speed information system allowed store managers to place orders based on analysis of historical sales data. Consumption patterns were analyzed on a real time basis to match demand with supply. Categorization of items was done on the basis of time of consumption and turnover rate to weed out non value adding items from value adding items throughout the day. Seven Eleven employs a Direct Store Delivery (DSD) model in the US that may not work in Japan. The main function of a DC in Japan is to aggregate the orders and deliver it to the many scattered stores which reduce transportation costs as well as receiving costs. A DSD model works better when stores are far flung and large in size as in the US. It is for the same reason that having CDCs will not be beneficial in the US. Also, a third party distributor
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