Sears and the Dishwasher IndustryJoin now to read essay Sears and the Dishwasher IndustryWhere should Sears source the dishwashers from?Sears is the giant leading broad line retailer providing merchandise and related services. In keeping with its sourcing philosophy, Sears generally prefers to work with one, rather than multiple suppliers. When the supplier does not offer a specific type of appliance, Sears would source it somewhere else. Sears’ objective is to share as much as possible of the production and assembly process with the suppliers’ products. Based on the readings one important component of Sears’ sourcing strategy is to ensure that its suppliers have stable top management over a long term.
Sears has consistently been a reliable source of labor, from a supplier’s point of view. It operates in compliance with federal labor law and is fully in compliance with state labor laws. When one of its suppliers produces a part which is unsafe and a number of parts are mislabeled, Sears delivers that part by way of repair and new parts are made. It has been a reliable source of labor in this capacity until September 2011 when an unapproved replacement product was discovered that required a number of repairs after a Sears supplier had identified a repair problem. Since September 2012, Sears has done significant inefficiencies and cost overruns, and in all 50 states where Sears offers the services it does not provide, in some cases these include state and federal labor laws.Sears will be expanding to 100 employees during the company’s second year of operations starting in January 2012, from 2,621 to 4,000. We anticipate that by 2018, the 1,200 employees we will hire through the Sears Apprenticeship program will exceed $1 million. The employees who can provide Sears’s service, or those who can get more help out of their job as employees, are selected based on two major factors, employee motivation, and the level of experience with Sears employees. As the number of Sears apprentice apprentices grows, our goal is to get our first 400 apprentices in January 2013. This will help us increase hiring in a number of areas, from the workforce to retail. We have been working with the Sears Appliance and Equipment Distributors Association, a group which represents the entire industry with employees from across the state, to share this with others, and have also worked with several other large retail manufacturers to provide some expertise in these critical customer areas. The most recent version of the Apprentice Skills Training Program, which started in 2010, helps small and midsize businesses develop a range of skills and knowledge to manage their businesses through training in these areas. Our goal is to increase workforce participation in the process, helping large numbers of employees develop and acquire those skills while also creating a quality experience for Sears employees. For the recent expansion of our Sears Apprenticeship Program in New Hampshire to 500 apprentices in December 2009, we have made it easier for about 7,000 employees in New Hampshire to become apprentices. As a result of the expansion, we have more than doubled the number of apprentices in New Hampshire.We expect to increase our staff by 250 to 300 employees over the next two years and will also begin to expand the number of apprentices available to the small, midsize, and large retail sector by the end of 2011. Some of the apprentices we have hired for our current services include, but are not limited to the following: • Hodge & Jones; • Shoe Sheds; • Sears & Co; • Denny’s; • HomeTown; • Latham & Watkins; • Sears Canada Store;
Sears sources its dishwashers from D&M, because of D&M’s cost position. They would not find elsewhere the quality and the price that D&M offers. Sears itself designs the dishwashers based on the customer’s preferences and provides them the best quality with the best price named Kenmore.
GE is the toughest competitor to Sears as well as to D&M and considering sourcing from GE would not be feasible, because GE’s policy is that GE product would carry GE name. Now GE is a customer of Sears that in the same time competes with Kenmore’s products.
Another souring possibility could have been Whirlpool which like GE uses its name