Project Planning & Schedule

Best Buy accomplishes routinely with different types of projects in several sectors of its wide scope of brands such as Best Buy, Audiovisions, The Carphone Warehouse, Future Shop, Geek Squad, Jiangsu Five Star, Magnolia Audio Video, Napster, Pacific Sales Kitchen and Bath Centers, The Phone House and Speakeasy.
Before taking steps toward new projects, Best Buy group pays careful attention to its stakeholder’s needs and expectations. Of course that among those, investors play a significant role before management makes decisions.
Because it is a very large group of global reaching, Best Buy carries projects in areas such as building construction, new-product introduction, startup or shutdown of a plant, auditing accounts.
One good example of a project can be a startup of a plant. In the United States or abroad, Best Buy identifies the project’s intent and prospective customers; establishes the local area; estimate total resources and time required for building arrangements; defines major tasks required, and set the budget line for the plant implementation.
Respecting the planning decisions and budget line, Best Buy focuses on the steps (or tasks) to be taken toward the project finalization. To every task must be stipulated the sequence in which tasks will be performed, the duration (time) of realization and time between the tasks, because one depends on the conclusion of others, and people who will perform each task.

The start point of a new plant, after decided the location, will be the renovation or construction of the facility. This part of the project usually demands a longer time period. Best Buy along with the countries’ standards as well as safety regulations must be taken into consideration. After the construction and correlated procedures have been done, subsequent installations according to Best Buy orientations and design must take place. Decorating and installing equipments are subsequent tasks to complete the installation of the facility. The following procedures should, then, be done toward hiring and training personnel and advertising, but these may be part of another simultaneous project.

Best Buy uses Gantt and network diagrams according to different projects and their needs for detailed tasks. The company counts on SmartDraw software to follow to and accomplish with its expected projects scheduling. In the case of more detailed and longer duration project like installing a new plant or facility, Best Buy utilizes network diagrams because of their more accurate responses to complex projects. Although the Gantt chart is easier to implement and understand, according to our view, Best Buy has better chosen the method network diagrams when specifying and analyzing schedules of larger and more complex projects like the implementation of a new plant.

Supply Chain Management

Best Buy focuses on a precise supply chain. The company focuses on moving nonsales activities higher up the supply chain to create a better effort on maximizing salespeople's time with customers. For example shipments are being configured to individual store floor plans so that store employees don't have to spend as much time moving products into their proper displays. Employees have more freedom to serve local market needs. Best Buy is also giving store employees greater flexibility in responding to demand. An example of this is to change the floor layout or eliminating a inventory management plan so the store can stock more of certain items to meet local product demands. The Supply chain has to react quickly to these signals from the store, updating shipments to accommodate a new floor plan. Best Buy is currently developing software to allow dispatchers to change the delivery schedules even when loads are already shipped. Best Buy believes in better information flow. The supply chain is being relied upon to improve the flow of information. Sales associates are able to access detailed information on product updates from the time an item is manufactured to its arrival at the store. This will create a more accurate date to when products will be actually available. Stores are now able to communicate changes in floor plans to distribution centers where loads are built and sent out. Anderson Best Buy CEO says he has just updated all IT communication systems.   

Recently this year Best Buy has been trying to make the supply chain more efficient so that there is less waste and greater accuracy in shipments. Higher delivery frequency and smaller shipments are starting to be implemented. Best Buy's customized network known as the Nibler Network is now putting more emphasis on distribution centers located closer to retail outlets. All imports from Asia are currently being shipped to two large Best Buy centers one being in Seattle and another in Long Beach, CA. These centers feed seven large distribution centers and fourteen smaller home delivery centers. The nibler network will now distribute more loads to smaller facilities. Anderson quotes again "We need a high-velocity distribution system, so that we are sending product to where it is needed, as opposed to just sending it". Best Buy along with their suppliers use another concept/SCM system known as Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR), which automates replenishment of products by linking suppliers and buyers electronically. 

1.) Delivery - Best Buy uses on demand delivery which is part of on-time delivery. If customers order a service or a product it is guaranteed to be delivered that day. If products are ordered online, the customer is able to track their order through the website. 

2.) Quality - Best Buy delivers the most high tech electronic goods for the most reasonable cost. Products quality is checked at the manufacturer using methods such as six sigma and no electronic good is sold if it is not in quality condition. Warranties and return policies are available to guarantee quality for the ultimate customer satisfaction.

3.) Time -  Best Buy's cash to cash cycle is averaged time to a month. It takes time for the manufacture to ship the product out of its logistic center to the actual store. From that day it takes time for the product to sell. Best Buy of course makes payments monthly to all it's suppliers.

4.) Cost - Best Buy spends alot of money on it's inventory and customer service. The company also spends a fair enough of money on it's supply chain systems because they have many suppliers. Logistics costs are another factor that money is spent on to get the appropriate to the correct stores. 

Recommendation 

I believe Best Buy is doing their best to get the right products at the right location. It makes me curious to find out if customers are unsatisfied with Best Buy's supply chain. Are the right products coming in at the appropriate schedule? I suggest Best Buy creates a customer survey evaluating their process. Find out if the customers actually know what a supply chain is and if so do they believe the products are coming in on time. 

Quality Control

Quality Control Methods:

Quality control is the stabilization and maintenance of a process to produce consistent output. Best Buy does not produce its own products so it does not exactly follow the same rules of quality control. With regards to the products it carries, we have mentioned earlier that BBY examines its inventory quite often and then determines the placement for certain products in certain stores, because BBY does not offer the same products in every single store. Best Buy does use quality control when it comes to their services which is mainly seen through employee to customer contact in the Process Quality Control method. In order to keep the employees reputable to their customers it is important for the employees to receive trainings on their products, services, and performance. On a monthly basis, employees participate in store meeting that discuss new changes to store policies, introductions to new products, and brush up on sales techniques. To further expand on this, weekly performance tests called 360's are given to test these techniques. Lastly, BBY employees maintain daily trainings through the use of ELearnings, which is an online training progarm designed to supply employees with in depth knowledge of new and existing products. Each of these quality control methods are overseen by supervisors and managers.

Quality Control Charts:
The use of Quality Control Charts is not really utilized at Best Buy. Although, BBY does test their employees, observe employees in action and survey customers, there is no particular chart that is used, instead managers are given disgretion to analyze and interpret employee performance.

Inspection Type:

As just mentioned, managers and supervisors operate as inspectors for inspection purposes. A supervisor works with general employees more closely and personably. These supervisors then report back to the manangers what they see. At the same time, managers walk around the store watching over employees and supervisors. Many times supervisors miss something, but guaranteed, a manager will most likely end up picking it up. For instance, the supervisor walk away to help a customer, but his subordinate sees this and decides to walk away and play with his phone, a manager who continuously scanning the departments, will come across this employee. The first time some managers will say something directly to the employee and some will say something to the supervisor. If it happens again the manager will formally write up the employee for their mistake. If it were to happen again the manager would terminate on site.

Continuous Improvement: Pareto Analysis v. Fishbone Diagrams
Best Buy does not use Continuous Improvement. BBY uses managers to inspect peformance and with their discretion they decide whether or not something is not peforming and does not necessarily follow any particular formula for determining defects in the process.

6 Sigma Practices:
Six Sigma is a systematic method for process improvement. Currently Best Buy had to resort to the six sigma practices. Because of a failing economy and threat of financial losses in the 2009 fiscal year, BBY needed to find ways to generate higher higher revenue and profit margins while cutting costs. Best Buy analyzed what they could do to generate more efficient practices by determining areas that they could improve, measuring the variable in that area, analyzing the areas in which they would need to change, implement the improvement and finally control the new change. BBY decided in order to cut cost and increase revenues and profit margins that they must do a better job in managing their sales teams. Employees went from recommending products that the employee felt were the best to recommending products that would also have the highest mark ups with a focus of attaching accessories and services to the sales. Best Buy has not been significantly injured by the economy yet, because they found a way to increase their revenues and profit margins, especially on a per sale basis. Next they decided to manage employee labor more efficiently. It wouldn't look good if BBY laid off thousands of employees, instead they lowered hours and changed the schedules. Recently, BBY offered a department of specialists that could assist customers in any department throughout the store, but in order to save on labor hours, they cut out the department and filtered those employees into specific departments like computers or home theatre. So instead of having a store with 30 employees on duty at once, they now had 25 or even less because now these transferred employees got rotated with the other guys in the department.

Recommendations:
Best Buy could do a few things that would correspond to their efforts that would make their process more efficient. BBY seeks to keep high customer contact and interaction, while also eliminating wasted labor. If BBY were to do better analysis of the store traffic, meaning the amount of customers shopping within the store at given time, day and department, it would keep labor down and decrease wasted standing around time or increase customer contact time.

http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/1486/best-buy-worst-customer-service

Quality

Quality of Design

Best Buy guarantees the highest quality of electronic designed products at prices that customers can afford. They are dedicated in providing exceptional and responsive service with attention to what the customer desires. With Best Buy working directly with their distributors, they can customize products that are uniquely found only in Best Buy locations. Their products are sold with company guarantees and their employees are highly trained in serving you, the customer with the most knowledge for your needs. It is no one wonder why Best Buy is number one in the retail electronics market.

Quality of Conformance 

Best Buy aims to sell products that are new and in high demand by today's consumers. Since being number one their products have to be the most technologically advanced in the market place. When customers enter a Best Buy store the quality of a product will stand out. The product should be new to the customer and create a desire for them to want it. Majority of Best Buy's products are unique in electronic technology giving that addiction for customers to keep wanting more. 

Employees are designated to work at their department of specialization. Upon being hired at Best Buy employees have to have knowledge and experience of the products they are going to sell. The company also will train their employees more about their departments and the Best Buy company department standards. Having outstanding knowledge and professional company skills, each employee can help every customer in making the right buying decision. Best Buy focuses highly on training their employees correctly in today's highly technologic world. Customers always have many questions of how electronic products work and Best Buy ensures them the best quality through their employees.

The "Abilities"

Best Buy is the most reliable electronic retail store in the country. Open seven days a week, customers can always find time to make a great shopping experience at Best Buy. Customers can also shop online 24/7 for their top quality electronic products. 

The store has an excellent maintainability through their customer service desk located in the front of every store. Best Buy customer service is rated in the top 50 of business week magazine last year. Customer service is also available seven days a week nine to five at 1-800-Best Buy for any customer questions or directories. 

Field Service

With every Best Buy product being sold, customers have multiple options of warranties sold by the company of the product. Just about 90% of the store consists of items that have company warranties just because of being in the electronic industry. Best Buy itself has a warrantee policy up to 30 days if the product fails to work or is damaged upon opening, the customer is guaranteed an exact refund or another copy of that product. 

Best Buy also employes service departments that are external from the store. Geek Squad being probably one of the most well known departments. This team of IT people service your computer right within the store or physically right in your house depending on your demand. Another service department that is fairly new to the company is the Home Entertainment team. This group of people installs the customer's home theater system right within your own house. The final group external group of service people best buy has is the appliance department. This team of workers installs refrigerators, washer/dryers, ovens and takes your old appliance in exchange. 

Recommendation: In order for Best buy to improve some of their service quality I would recommend the company to give more educational background on some of the products. Let's face it some people will never understand technology products such as Computers and the difference between plasma vs LCD screen TVs. It's all great having an employee try to explain what is better but wouldn't it be great if an expert like an engineer gave some professional input in on the product. I feel this could be accomplished by having a program or video being ran at every department discussing topics like what is RAM and what does it to to enhance my computer. Between the employee explaining and an educated professional, the customer would be 100% quality insured on the product.

Best Buy Service

Services:

Best Buy uses 3 elements of the service-product bundle. These three bundles include, explicit service, implicit service and facilitating goods. Explicit service are tangible services such as fast and accurate service. Implicit refers to the feelings created by the service, like that of dread for going to work. Facilitating goods are the actual tangible products, for example when you receive the toy you bought at the toy store. Best Buy is mainly recognized as a distributor of electronic devices and accessories. Their electronic devices and accessories would be considered to be their facilitating goods, where the customers will physically receive their products in hand. Despite Best Buy's reputation for products, they are a leader in offering explicit services include their Best Buy Credit cards, reward zone cards, computer/tv/car installations and protection plans. Best Buy offers their credit cards and Reward Zone cards to customers to keep them connected to Best Buy for current and future purchases. Best Buy has several implicit services in which they wish to deliver to their customers. The implicit services are low prices, educate of the consumer, good customer service and friendly shopping environment. All of these implicit services work together to form one of Best Buy's ultimate goals of customer satisfaction.

Best Buy offers their services to customers in a pretty standardized way. Customers are given limited customization options and or standardized. This process of offering services is known on the service matrix as the co-routed service method. Best Buy offers services to consumers to deliver, set up, mount and calibrate their televisions, but not the option of the customer creating their own customized service.

Customer Contact/ Employee Support:

Best Buy follows the Face-to-Face Tight Specs customer contact system. Within this system, it requires Best Buy to offer high customer contact. Best Buy has a system of measuring their customer with a few questions they give their employees to ask in order to determine how much time is needed to efficiently help the customer and still meet both parties’ needs. Best Buy employees are trained to ask relevant information to determine whether or not the customer requires demonstrations of higher end products vs. lower end and also to determine if the customer needs complete undivided attention vs. quick Q&A’s. By training employees to recognize customer needs it allows for smoother relationship management and to convert those browsers into customers. One example is that a gentleman might walk into PC Richards and want to look at high end televisions. The PC Richards rep is taught to spend less time with the customer discussing the features of the TV and more time trying to complete the sale. If that customer wants to purchase a high end television, he is generally going to want more attention because more of his hard earned money will be going into the sale. 

 These customers may seek Best Buy for help in the decision because they will get undivided attention. This is one of Best Buy’s competitive advantages. At the same time that the customer is looking for a high end TV, another customer is looking for a quick purchase and an associate would be assisting him in a timely manner. So although high customer contact can be considered to be inefficient, Best Buy found a way to convert that inefficiency into a positive outcome for both the customer and company. One way Best Buy goes about supporting their employees is by training their employees with demonstrations by managers and with instructional computer based programs. Best Buy offers their employees the CARE PLUS system in order to remain constant and efficient. The Care Plus System includes C-Contact the customer, A-Ask the customer questions, R-Recommend the best solutions, E-Encourage the customer to make the purchase and lastly Plus- Plus whatever else you personally can give the customer to enhance their shopping experience. Best Buy does have many departments or segments to their business that utilize low customer contact including, the Media Department where you would find DVD’s, Games, and Music. Two other departments or segments include Phone Sales and Dot.Com sales. Phone sales involve a customer calling in and purchase a predetermined product that can easily and quickly be picked up at a later time. The same goes for Dot.Com purchases. A Dot.Com purchase allows for customers to take their time to shop online and then pick up their orders within the store. There is very little customer contact in those examples. For the most part Best Buy uses a combination of Technology and Focused Operations to for customer contact. Everything is strategically set up to ensure the customer has the best experience. Because Best Buy is a major retailer they use technology for Point of Sale Scanners, Bar Code Readers, inventory control computers and telecommunication.

Service Recovery & Guarantees:

 Buy stands out from many companies because they can cost effectively manage their products to and from the customer. Best Buy offers a 30 day Return Policy on most items except for Camera’s, Camcorders, Desktop Computers and Laptop Computers. Best Buy will even extend their 30 day return policy during the holiday season to one month following Christmas. Within a BBY store there is a designated area for returns and exchanges, called Customer Service. At customer service, if a customer is returning an item, the associate will collect the product and check for damages and parts. From there, the associate will send it either to the department for inspection or to Geek Squad, who fully tests the product to determine if it needs to be sent back to the manufacturer. If a product passes all inspections it will be repackaged and put back out onto the sales floor and sold at a discounted rate for being an Open Item. This allows for BBY to not fully lose out on their costs. Best Buy also offers extended warranties on most major electronics and some Medias like Games and DVD’s. For each product that an extended warranty is offered, there are different sets of rules that apply to its policies.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2004/07/01/374813/index.htm

Best Buy Process

Best Buy currently utilizes the Batch Flow system and Assembly Line system where they order medium to high quantities of volume with medium variety or selections. They try to attract different kinds of consumers to their stores. Best Buy is unique in that they do not have the same selections in each of their stores either. They often follow mass customization process in order to fit different needs and keep costs low.

Best Buy mainly follows the Make To Stock customer order process. This allows best buy to not have to spend more money for special customizations and high productions costs. Best Buys Computer Department could be considered Assemble TO Order because they sell their specific selection of computers, but they can easily add a few extra’s, such as Microsoft Office, or anti-virus programs.

Best Buy falls between the Batch and Assembly Line, corresponding to High Volume, Few Major Products on the process characteristics matrix.

Factors influencing their process selection are based on geographic and demographical factors. In some areas they house stores that are in wealthy areas where higher end products would sell well, yet they offer lower end products for in more economically challenged areas.

Best Buy can best be describes as using mass customization. BBY often gives different selections, but usually not at the consumer specific request, more based on research and purchasing statistics.

http://ilog.com/products/product_flow_optimizer/

Best Buy Inventory Policy

Best Buy currently utilizes the ABC Inventory Management system. This system's purpose is to set priorities on effort used to manage different products. Of the ABC Management system, the major policy initiated is the P System or Periodic Review. Through an electronic catalog or database called RSS or Retek Store System. Best Buy tracks purchases and closely follows stock. The inventory is maintained on a weekly basis to see which items need to be replenished. If Best Buy sells 5 Samsung ln46a650 televisions this week, then the computer system will automatically place an order for 5 to be shipped on the next inbound shipment from their warehouse. This periodic review system allows for Best Buy to not have to spend extra time and money for checking inventory on a daily basis. Best buy establishes this weekly checking by calculating Q/d. In order for fast and efficient deliveries maintaining stock, they splice up their hundreds of stores into districts. Each district is based on geographic regions and each district is assigned a regional warehouse to order from. By setting up multiple warehouses, a store in NJ doesn't just have to wait for their deliveries from their head quarters home in Minnesota. Best Buy uses this system in conjunction with their sales promotions. If Best Buy sees a product not moving consistently off their shelves they will most likely set up a promotion to increase purchases, but they might first order extra units depending on their weekly counts.

http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/4296228-1.html